The Bulgars in the Balkans and the Occupation
of Corinth in the Seventh Century

.

Kenneth M. Setton(Speculum, 25, 4, 1950,
502-543).

.

THE present paper will seek to present a synthesis of the sixth-
and seventh-century activities of the Bulgars in the Balkans, and by bringing
into apposition, in such a manner as has not been done before, certain
historical and archaeological evidence, to suggest — for much historical
discussion 'suggest' is a more fitting word than 'prove' — the extreme
probability of the occupation of Corinth by the Onogur Bulgars in the middle
of the seventh century. The fifteenth-century Greek ecclesiastic, Isidore,
Metropolitan of Kiev (1437-1442), a prominent figure in the Councils of
Ferrara and Florence, declares in a petition which he addressed about 1429
to the Patriarch of Constantinople, in behalf of the then Metropolitan
of Monemvasia, that the Onogur Bulgars took Corinth without a struggle.
This statement has never been taken seriously, but it seems to me that
the weight of the evidence, which we shall examine as we proceed, is entirely
in favor of the fundamental truth of Isidore's statement, although he has,
to be sure, erred in both the time and circumstances of the Bulgaric occupation
of Corinth. We shall find it worthwhile in the pages that follow to detail
certain of the more important facts concerning the early Bulgars, together
with some peoples related to them, both in their homeland and in the Balkans;
to show from the learned studies of Professor Gyula Moravcsik of Budapest
that the so-called Danube Bulgars were Onogurs; to outline the history
of the first Hunnic (or rather Bulgaric), Slavic, and Avaric attacks upon
the Balkan provinces of the Byzantine Empire and to depict the political
circumstances under which they occurred; to deal with both the legends
and facts in the career of the Bulgaric prince Kovrat, with the assistance
of an instructive paper by Professor Gregoire; to consider, for what it
may be worth, the pertinent evidence in the Chronicle of Monemvasia
and in a well known Scholium of Arethas of Caesarea; to fit into the now
known flow of events some important archaeological evidence from the seventh
century at Corinth, erroneously interpreted by the archaeologists; and,
finally, to show that our combined historical and archaeological evidence
now points, it seems to me, to an Onoguric occupation of Corinth in the
seventh century, to which fact, whatever his errors, Isidore of Kiev is
obviously alluding. Isidore writes:

And now two sacks of Corinth were witnessed during the period
of Roman domination over the Peloponnesus, one in the days of Justinian
the Great, who on this account later fortified the Isthmus [and the other
as a consequence of the Fourth Crusade], for in Justinian's time three
Scythian tribes, called the Kutrigurs, Utigurs, and Onogurs [Korrfyapot,
Ourr^apot mi Ovvlyapoi], having crossed the Danube, one of these tribes
ravaged upper Moesia, Pannonia, and Dalmatia and the regions right up to
the Ionian Sea in a single expedition, while the Utigurs ravaged all Thrace
and the Hellespontine Chersonese and all the territories on this side of
the Hebrus to the very walls of the city of Constantine, and these Belisarius
checked, outwitting and crushing them, but the

503

Onogurs laying waste to Macedonia, Thessaly, Greece, and
everything within Thermopylae, and pillaging even as far as Corinth, they
straightway took the city without a single blow.[1]

In the fifth-century certain so-called Hunnic peoples, generally known
as Bulgars, often accompanied apparently by the Slavs, began their raids
upon the northernmost provinces of the Balkan peninsula, and these raids
had become almost serious by the time of the Emperor Anastasius I (491-518)
. [2] Largely responsible for these raids were the Bulgar
tribes known as the Utigurs, who lived to the east, and the Kutrigurs,
who lived to the west of the Don. In 482 the Emperor Zeno is said to have
sought the aid of the Bulgars against the Ostrogoths, [3]
and from the 490's on the Bulgar tribesmen made frequent raids upon Thrace,
Moesia, and Illyricum. [4] Less bellicose, perhaps, than
the Bulgars were the Slavs, who proved to be, however, no less a menace
to the Balkan provinces — and more of a menace to Greece — than the Bulgars,
for the Slavs came in greater numbers, flowed in persistently and undramatically,
seeking homes in which to settle. However, despite much controversy during
the past century, there is now some agreement — among some scholars — that
there were no significant Slavic settlements in Greece proper until the
eighth and ninth decades of the sixth century. [5] Byzantine
writers in telling of events relating to the Huns, Bulgars, Avars, Antae,
Slavs, and numerous other peoples, have created by general and careless
descriptions much confusion in Byzantine and Balkan history, but in late
years the valuable researches of Moravcsik and others have deepened our
understanding of many important aspects of the early history of these peoples.
Much doubt and much debate will, presumably, always attach themselves to
particular peoples as well as to particular persons. Thus, assisting 'Kouver,'
whom we believe to be the Bulgar Khan Kovrat, and to whom we shall return,
in a bold intrigue against Thessalonica in the middle of the seventh century
(as we believe) was a certain Mauros, apparently a Bulgar, who feigned
flight to Thessalonica as a refugee seeking protection against his former
lord. Mauros knew Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Bulgarian (kai
thn kaq' hmaV epistamenoV glvssan kai thn 'Pwmaiwn,
Sklabwn kai Boulgarwn), [6] but what really was
his 'nationality'? Can we not believe that in the turmoil of peoples milling
back and forth in the Balkans Mauros had more than once in the years preceding
had occasion to change his nationality as danger required or convenience
suggested?

The word 'Hun’ is very generally and very carelessly used in both Byzantine
and western sources, and may have, in fact, some twenty different meanings,
referring to such diverse peoples as Avars, Bulgars (in general), Burugundi,
Cumans, Goths, Hungarians (Magyars), Kutrigurs, Lombards, Onogurs, Ottomans,
Sabirs, Seljuks, Turks (in general), Utigurs, and Uz. [7]
The Huns and Bulgars were cousins, but not brothers: the Huns were eastern
Turks, while the Bulgars were western Turks, and spoke a language distinct
from the common Turkish of the Huns. One cannot hope to differentiate too
closely among the various Bulgar peoples, for all the Bulgar tribes and
nations were of mixed racial stock, and the very name Bulgar, according
to the great philologist J. Nemeth, is of Turkish origin, and meant 'mixed,'
[8]
and so denoted 'ein Volk, das sich aus verschiedenen Elementen zusammengesetzt
hatte. [9] There have been, however,

504

other interpretations of the word Bulgar and other attempts to depict
the obscure history which lies behind it. [10]

If the Huns, properly speaking, are to be distinguished from the Bulgars,
the Hungarians must be kept apart from both of them. This is not always
easy, for Moravcsik has shown in some detail how close relations were between
the Hungarians and the Onogur Bulgars. The linguistic evidence has, of
course, proved the Finno-Ugrian origin of the Hungarians (or Magyars),
but early in their history they had come in close contact with Bulgaro-Turks,
i.e., especially the Onogurs, perhaps in the Ugric lands in western Siberia,
east of the Urals, where they joined the Bulgaro-Turks in the fifth century
in the westward movement which brought both groups of peoples to the northern
and eastern shores of the Black Sea. From the Bulgaro-Turkish On-ogur,
'ten arrows,’ comes the name Hungarian [11] — the Onogurs
and Magyars had long lived together as almost a single nation — the name
'Hungarian' was fastened upon the Magyars by the Slavs, for they had once
been part of the Onogur nation, and the Slavs continued to call them 'Onogurs'
(Ugri, Ungari). Although the Magyars, a very mixed people, were not originally
of Turkish stock, they were or became close relatives of the Onogurs. The
Magyars maintained, from the middle of the fifth to the middle of the seventh
century, very close, indeed symbiotic, relations with the Onogur Bulgars,
which explains the markedly Bulgaro-Turkish imprint apparent upon the Magyar
language and early social organization. [12]

The Onogurs established themselves in the northern-Caucasus region,
between the Don and the Kuban (6 Xeyoftevos Ko00ts 7rora/z6s), about the
middle of the fifth century. [13] They remained in their
new homes near the Kuban throughout the sixth century, and they formed
the basis of the power of Old Great Bulgaria (o legomenoV
koufiV potamoV), on Lake Maeotis, a barbarian empire established
along the northeastern outposts of the Byzantine Empire by the great Onogur
Kovrat in the early seventh century. [14] When Great
Bulgaria fell before the advance of the Khazars in the later seventh century,
some of the Onogurs, and other peoples who dwelt with them, became subject
to the Khazars and paid tribute to them, while other Onogurs moved into
the Danube region, presumably under Kovrat's famous son Asparuch. [15]
Here the Onogurs became known as the Danube Bulgars. (It is conceivable
that there were certain groups of Kutrigurs now dwelling with them.) The
Onogurs furnished the most numerous and strongest tribes in the new Bulgaria,
for an eighth-century Byzantine source, describing the events of 713 when
the Emperor Philip Bardanes fell from power, dwells on the depredations
in Thrace perpetrated by the Empire's dangerous new neighbors, who are
specifically named the 'Onogur Bulgars' (h .
. . efodoV tou geitniazontoV eqnoV Ounnogourwn Boulgarwn
.
. . ). [16] Part of the Onogurs remained behind, however,
in their now old home between the Crimea and the Caucasus, for the episcopal
list of the 'eparchy of Gothia' (eparcia GotqiaV),
contained in the so-called 'Notitia of the Isaurians,' provides for a 'Bishop
of the Onogurs' (o [episkopoV
o] 'Onogourwn), [17]
a missionary suffragan of the Crimean Gothic Metropolitan. [18]
This list, which some scholars have dated between 733 and 746, has been
recently connected by Vernadsky with the mission which Constantine the

505

Philosopher, later known as St Cyril (the Apostle to the Slavs), undertook
to Khazaria in A.D. 861 or 862, and Vernadsky believes that part of the
Onoguric peoples must have still been in the region east of the Sea of
Azov as late as the second half of the ninth century. The list of bishoprics
constituting the Gothic province is contained, as we have stated, in the
so-called 'Notitia of the Isaurians,' which has been the subject of much
learned discussion, but whether the Gothic list should be dated in the
eighth or the ninth century, and whatever the dates and sources of other
sections of the Notitia, and whether the Gothic list itself represents
a real or merely an imaginary or desired organization, we seem to have
here valid evidence of the presence of the Onogurs in the Crimean region,
and this at a period considerably later than their establishment on the
Danube. [19]

According to Theophanes and the Patriarch Nicephorus, whose accounts
are derived from some common source, the Danube Bulgars appeared in Thrace,
to remain, in the year 679. [20] The Bulgars had not
been nomads, however, as Professor Feher has amply demonstrated, but even
before the fifth century, long before their settlement in the Balkans,
the Bulgars had been 'un peuple etabli, s'occupant d'elevage en grand et
d'agriculture. [21] Before 679, very likely, Bulgars
had occupied the Dobrudja and built the fortifications at Garac, between
the Sereth and the Pruth, just above the points where the rivers flow into
the Danube; at Nicolicel, just south of the delta of the Danube; and upon
sites even far into Moesia. [22] Old Great Bulgaria
had been established early in the seventh century by Kovrat (Kubrat) along
the shores of Lake Maeotis and in the region of the Kuban. Kovrat was the
ruler (kurioV) of the Onogurs or Onogunduri,
according to the Patriarch Nicephorus (ed. de Boor, p. 24); and Theophanes
(ed. de Boor, I, 356) attributes to him lordship over 'the Onogundurs,
Bulgars, and Kutrigurs' (oi Ounnogoundouroi, Boulgaroi
kai Kotragoi). [23] Kovrat died in 642, the second
year of the reign (641-668) of the Emperor Constans II (Constantine III);
both Theophanes and Nicephorus tell the story of his leaving behind five
sons who separated despite his admonition that they should remain together
and preserve the unity of his realm. Of these alleged five sons only two
seem to have been historical figures, but the whole legend seems to have
arisen from the dissolution of Kovrat's Great Bulgaria between the Don
and the Kuban into five groups of peoples. The first son Baian remained
near the Kuban when, just after the middle of the seventh century, the
Khazars reduced him to the position of a tribute-paying ally, and it is
in this group of Onogurs that Moravcsik would see one of the chief constituent
elements in the later Magyars. [24] The third son, Asparuch
('Asparouc), is also an historical figure. Upon
the appearance of the Khazars he moved westward across the Don, the Dnieper,
and the Dniester, with perhaps less than half the Onogurs, and settled
in the Danube region in 679-680, and the history of modern Bulgaria was
thus begun. [25] For seven centuries Bulgaria remained
a formidable neighbor to Byzantium, until it fell before the Ottoman advance
and became a Turkish province (1389-1396), and such it remained for almost
five hundred years. [26] The other three sons of Kovrat
are probably mythical figures. Kotragos, the second son, is said to have
been the leader of the Kutrigurs, but since the Kutrigurs were so named
long before the

506

time of Kotragos, he must have received the name from them rather than
they from him, but in any event he seems to belong to legend rather than
to history. [27] The fourth and fifth sons are nameless,
and that is probably just as well. The fourth son is said to have gone
into Pannonia and become subject to the dread Avars — at the beginning
of the ninth century the great Khan Krum united the Bulgars in Pannonia
with those under the khanate at Pliska — while the fifth is said to have
gone into Italy. [28] Moravcsik has, however, ingeniously
found the five groups of peoples into which the realm of Kovrat appears
to have broken: 1) the Onogurs, or cousins of the Onogurs, under Baïan,
who remained on the Kuban, whence came, Moravcsik thinks, the Hungarians
of a later period; 2) the Onogurs under Asparuch, who became known as the
Danube Bulgars; 3) the Kutrigurs, over whom Kovrat had once ruled; 4) the
later Volga-Bulgars, who survived until the appearance of the Mongols;
and 5) the Bashkirs, who were a part of the Hungarian people. [29]
This theory suggests that the Onogur tribes of Turkish origin, true Bulgars,
went west to the Danube under Asparuch, while that part of the Onogurs
of Finno-Ugrian origin remained by the Kuban and became subject to the
Khazars just after the middle of the seventh century. The two groups of
Onogurs had been, although close relatives, essentially different peoples;
the ease with which they separated now becomes more intelligible; and,
if MoravcsikY theory is true, the beginnings of Magyar history become a
bit clearer. The Hungarians would now feel, less and less, the Onogur influence,
but their chiefs, after Baian, remained still of Onogur-Bulgar descent;
however, the Finno-Ugrian character of the people now became intensified,
and they became Magyars, a name itself of Finno-Ugrian origin. [30]

The raids of Bulgars and other new barbarians upon the Byzantine Empire
became increasingly dangerous from the first years of Justinian's reign,
and the contemporary historians Procopius and John Malalas, among others,
are unhappy witnesses to the severity of their depredations. [31]
In 527 Bulgars, Slavs, and western Antae ravaged Illyricum and Thrace,
perhaps the first historically certain attack by the Slavs, in force and
in large numbers, upon the Empire (although for generations there had probably
been a persistent infiltration into the northern Balkan provinces). [32]
Two years later, in 529-530, a Bulgaric horde invaded Scythia and Lower
Moesia, and ravaged Thrace; [33] another attack, in
the next year, was driven back by Mundus, the Byzantine commander in Illyricum,
who destroyed their army, captured much booty, and sent one of their chieftains
in chains to the capital. [34] 'Peace was then restored
in Thrace, and fear seized the barbarians.' [35] In
the fourth year of Justinian's reign Chilbudius was appointed from the
Emperor's own household, to the office of magister militum in Thrace
(QrakhV strathgoV), 'and was assigned to guard
the river Ister [Danube], being ordered to keep watch, so that the barbarians
of that region could no longer cross the river, since the Huns and Antae
and Sclaveni had already made the crossing many times and done irreparable
harm to the Romans.' [36] Chilbudius held the barbarians
back beyond the Danube for three years, and often carried the war across
the river to them, 'and killed and enslaved the barbarians there,'

507

but rendered over confident by his exploits, in 533-534 he crossed the
Danube with a small force, and the Slavs defeated and killed him. [37]
A half dozen years later, in 539-540, Procopius informs us that 'a mighty
Hunnic [Bulgaric] army crossing the Danube River fell as a scourge upon
all Europe. . . . For from the Ionian Gulf these barbarians plundered everything
in order as far as the suburbs of Byzantium. They captured thirty-two fortresses
in Illyricum, and they carried by storm the city of Cassandria. . . . '
[38]
They pillaged Illyricum and Thessaly in another invasion (540), turned
the fortified pass at Thermopylae, and 'destroyed almost all the Greeks
except the Peloponnesians,' for the walls of the Isthmus checked their
advance any further south. [39] The disasters led Justinian
to organize the vast series of fortifications throughout all the northern
provinces of the Balkan peninsula, and in various other strategic places
to the south, such as Thermopylae and Corinth: new forts were constructed,
old ones were reconstructed, and they numbered, in all, some six hundred.
[40]
Not long after the Bulgaric depredations of 540, the (western) Antae and
certain groups of the Slavs became hostile to each other, and in an ensuing
battle the Antae were defeated by their fellow Slavs. Justinian sought
to divide and rule. He proposed to settle the Antae, an Eastern Slavic
people, led, it is now suggested, by a Sarmatian ruling clan, [41]
in the abandoned Trajanic city and region of Turris, on the left bank of
the lower Danube, where as foederati they might be employed against
the Bulgars. [42] Justinian seems thus to have removed
the Antae from among his barbarian enemies,
[43] and
in 545 the eunuch Narses, with a number of Heruli under him intended for
the army in Italy, met and defeated a great horde of Slavs, who had crossed
the Danube and were pillaging Thrace.
[44] Two or three
years later, in 548-549, the Slavs again crossed the Danube; they 'spread
desolation throughout the whole of Illyricum as far as Epidamnus [Durazzo],
killing or enslaving all who came their way'; and the imperial commanders,
with fifteen thousand men at their disposal, lacked courage enough 'to
get close to the enemy.' [45] In 549-550 about three
thousand Slavs crossed the Hebrus River (the modern Maritza), divided into
two parts, one ravaging Illyricum and the other Thrace, and defeated the
Byzantine commanders, although the latter had caught them thus divided.
The coastal city of Topirus in Thrace, opposite the island of Thasos, and
but twelve days' distance from the capital, was stormed by the invaders,
whose terrible cruelties Procopius recounts in gruesome detail. [46]
In the summer of 550, or 551, a great body of Slavs appeared again on Roman
soil: 'they had come with the intention of capturing by siege both Thessalonica
itself and the cities around it,' but the formidable reputation of the
Byzantine general Germanus, who was then in Sardica, and whom Justinian
directed to defend Thessalonica, caused the Slavs to abandon their ambitious
plan and, instead, to harass Dalmatia.
[47] Procopius,
writing his Secret History about this time, gives us a depressing,
even if much exaggerated, summary of conditions in the Balkans: 'Illyricum
and Thrace, from the Ionian Sea to the suburbs of Byzantium, were overrun
almost every year since Justinian's accession to the throne by Huns, Sclavenes,
and Antae, who dealt atrociously with the inhabitants. In every

508

invasion I suppose that about 200,000 Roman subjects were killed or
enslaved; the whole land became a sort of Scythian desert — ‘[48]
but the invasions of the Balkans were just beginning: 'Ce n'etait la qu'un
prelude' (Dvornik).

The contemporary historian Agathias describes in stirring fashion the
movement of the Bulgars known as the Kutrigurs under a chieftain named
Zabergan in the winter of 558-559. The Kutrigurs, who got along badly with
the Utigurs, who dwelt near them, sought wealth and adventure in the Byzantine
empire, to which the Utigurs were bound by an alliance which Justinian
had negotiated with them. Crossing the frozen Danube, the Kutrigurs under
Zabergan made their way unchallenged through the provinces of Scythia and
Moesia, and in Thrace they divided into three groups in order to pillage
a larger area. The first group, under Zabergan himself, planned an attack
upon Constantinople, but they were foiled and turned back by the courage
and imagination of the veteran Belisarius; the second group tried to occupy
the Thracian Chersonese, but were defeated by the Byzantine commander,
Germanus; and the third group, sent into Greece, plundered Macedonia and
Thessaly, but were stopped by the garrison at Thermopylae. When the Kutrigurs
were at last forced to withdraw beyond the Danube, Justinian incited the
hostile Utigurs against them; the Utigurs soon disappear from history,
while the Kutrigurs had already fallen under Avaric domination. [49]

From the close of Justinian's reign (565) until the reign of the great
soldier Heraclius (610-641) the history of the Balkan provinces is a tedious
chronicle of death and destruction in which the Avars figure with most
prominence. In 567 they helped the Lombards destroy the kingdom of the
Gepids, and seized their lands, in Pannonia, for themselves (568), whereupon
the Lombards were obliged to seek their fortunes in Italy. [50]
The Avars retained some hold upon this region, together with territories
farther east, for almost two centuries and a half, until the famous campaigns
of Charlemagne (791-799). Avaric envoys from the Caucasus had first waited
upon Justinian in 558 and received costly gifts from him, and had thereafter
defeated, in his behalf and their own, the Onogurs and Zali (exepolemwqhsan
OunigouriV, eita ZaloiV, Ounnikw fulw); made the Kutrigurs their
subjects; crushed the Sabirs; invaded the land of the Antae; and swept,
in the middle 560's, up to the Elbe and menaced the Frankish kingdom of
Austrasia. [51] In 565 the Emperor Justin II haughtily refused to continue
the tribute which Justinian had paid them. [52] But
Baïan, the Khagan (caganoV) of the Avars,
did not abate his claim to tribute, for it had previously been paid to
the Utigurs and Kutrigurs, and to other peoples as well, and he insisted
to the imperial government that, since Sirmium had been a possession of
the Gepids, it now rightfully belonged to the Avars. In 568 he laid siege
to Sirmium, 'and he ordered ten thousand Huns, who are called Kutrigurs
[Bulgars] to cross the river Save and to ravage Dalmatia,’ with the remark
that, if they lost their lives in the undertaking/ he would feel no sense
of loss.' [53] The Byzantine troops which were to dissuade
Baïan from giving further offense to the government were defeated,
and peace was finally made in 573, the reluctant Justin II, whose stubborn
refusal to treat with the Avars had prolonged hostilities through

509

several years, now having no alternative but to pay the tribute. [54]
Justin's co-ruler Tiberius Constantine, in 574-575, accepted as the amount
to be paid each year the not inconsiderable sum of 80,000 pieces of gold
(ogdohkonta ciliadeV eiV etoV ekaston vomismatwn),
[55]
for which he hoped to find among the Avars forces that he might employ
against the Persians in the eastern provinces and against the Slavs in
the Balkans. [56] Perhaps Tiberius had not miscalculated
entirely for in 578, as we shall note again, when one hundred thousand
Slavs ravaged Thrace and descended into Greece, the Avars assisted the
Byzantine government against them, while Tiberius was himself occupied
with an offensive against the Persians. [57] But Baïan
now had the Emperor at a great disadvantage, and he pressed for the peaceful
surrender of Sirmium, and when he was answered with a refusal, a period
of three years of Avaric hostility and depredation against the empire was
begun (579-582), in which the Balkan provinces suffered severely, and which
ended in victory for the Avars: Baïan received Sirmium, and the tribute
was resumed, with the payment of some 240,000
nomismata, presumably,
to cover the three-year period during which it had fallen into arrears
(triwn etwn parwchmenwn crusion), [58]
We owe most of what we know of these crucial years of Avaro-Byzantine history
to
the contemporary annalist Menander Protector, whose so-called Legationes
furnish us with a succinct, intelligible, and apparently reliable account
of the events we have just described. [59]

In the year 578, as we have already noted, when Tiberius Constantine
was in his fourth year as Caesar and co-ruler with Justin II, a horde of
some hundred thousand Slavs, according to Menander, gathered in Thrace,
which they ravaged, together with 'many other places’. [60]
They apparently forced the pass of Thermopylae, because they 'plundered
Greece.' [61] Tiberius, of course, was occupied with
the Persians in the east, and the Balkan provinces were in the gravest
peril (579-80), but Baïan, the khagan of the Avars, when appealed
to by Tiberius, entered the stricken provinces as their defender, for he
bore much animus against the Slavs himself, and was pleased to assail them,
and to relieve them of the booty they had accumulated. [62]
The opportunity was too good for Baïan not to take advantage of the
Emperor also; he now secured Sirmium which he had long coveted, together
with three years' tribute (580-82), as we have seen, for Tiberius was loathe
to add a prolonged struggle with the Avars to the other troubles that harassed
him beyond endurance. [63] An inscription from Sirmium
(Mitrovitza), which dates almost surely from the Avaric wars of 579-582,
contains the pitiful appeal: 'Lord Christ, help the city and smite the
Avar and watch over Romania and the writer. Amen.' [64]

The late sixth-century historian Evagrius, of Syrian Epiphania, declares
that 'the Avars, having twice made inroads as far as the so-called Long
Wall, besieged and enslaved Singidunum [Belgrade, which Justinian had restored
and heavily fortified], Anchialus, and indeed all Greece [kai
thn 'Ellada pasan], together with other
cities and garrisons, destroying and burning everything, while most of
the armed forces were engaged in the East.' [65] The
contemporary historian John of Ephesus (507-586) has also left a lugubrious
account of these years and these events, which, like the passage we have
just noted from Evagrius, is

510

often quoted in the present connection: In the third year of the reign
of the Emperor Tiberius (581), declares John of Ephesus, the accursed Slavs
invaded the Empire, traversed all Greece, pillaged Thrace and Thessaly,
took many towns and fortified places, and settled into the country as though
it were their own. This went on for four years [581-584], during which
time they moved about as they liked. Tiberius was fighting the Persians
in the east. The Slavs ravaged and burned everything up to the outer walls
of the capital; drove off the imperial herds and those of less exalted
owners; and even as John was writing, in the year 584, Slavs (and Avars)
lived without fear in the Balkan provinces. They had enriched themselves
by rapine; they had gold and silver and horses; and their armed hordes
had learned to fight better than the Romans. [66] How
many Slavs were able to remain behind, after about 580, in permanent settlements
in Greece has been a much-disputed question since the early nineteenth
century, [67] but the numbers must have been not entirely
inconsiderable. The Miracula S. Demetrii also furnishes evidence
of the Avaro-Slavic devastation, at this time, of Illyricum and Thrace,
and the more northern Balkan provinces would seem to have lost large numbers
of their Greek inhabitants. [68] These attacks of Slavs
and Avars apparently began in 578-579, and continued in force until about
584-585, during which time the ethnographic character of northern Greece
must have been permanently altered by a process of violent Slavonization,
for in the course of the invasion of 578-585, according to the Miracula,
the Greek natives of Illyricum and Thrace were transported north of the
Danube, to the region around Sirmium, where they were 'mixed with Bulgars,
Avars, and other peoples,' although they were returned to their homes,
some sixty years later, about 640-641, by the Bulgaric Khan Kovrat, after
he had defeated the Avars, and the once great empire of Bai'an had dissolved.
The Greeks, together with Bulgars and others, were now resettled in the
plain of Monastir and elsewhere, as the author of the Miracula informs
us, as 'a new people' (alloV neoV . . . laoV).
[69]

Much of the Slavonization of the Balkans and of Greece itself was undoubtedly
brought about by a process of peaceful penetration, unknown numbers of
Slavs coming at unknown times and under unknown circumstances. It is not
possible to say how numerous and how important the permanent Slavic settlements
were in Greece following Kovrat's settlement in 640, but a century later,
in 746-747, a great plague resulted in large numbers of Slavs being brought
into Greece, and even scholars, like Professor Zakythinos, who have been
very loath to see Slavic settlements in Greece proper before the time of
Constantine V (741-775) acknowledge that after 746 there are permanent
Slavic settlements to be found in lands once dear to the gods and heroes
of classical antiquity. Possibly it was Constantine V himself who peopled
the open country with Slavs, after the fashion of Heraclius' alleged settling
the Croats and Serbs in Illyricum, but the cities still remained pretty
much untouched, and the Slavs in continental Greece and the peninsula tended
their flocks and tilled the soil, and paid the imposts laid upon them by
the imperial government. They came, that is, but they had not conquered.
They erected no states in Greece that we know of, although late in the
eighth century a Slavic prince such as Akamir ('AkamhroV),
lord of Belzetia

511

in southern Thessaly, was powerful enough apparently to plot the rescue
of the five sons of Constantine V, exiled to Athens by the Empress Irene,
with the ambitious hope, it is said, of setting one of these last Isaurians
upon their father's throne. [70] But such a display
of Slavic enterprise was very rare in Greece, and Akamir is one of the
few Slavic princes (in Greece) whose names are preserved in the records.
There are two classic texts for the Slavonization of Greece, supplied by
Constantine Porphyrogenitus and the tenth-century scholiast on Strabo's
Geography,
and we cite them solely that the reader may not be disappointed at not
finding them somewhere in this article. Porphyrogenitus says that 'all
the [open] country [cora] was slavonized and
became barbarian, when the fatal pestilence ravaged all the world [in the
year 746], when Constantine V Copronymus wielded the scepter of the Roman
Empire,’ [71] and the scholiast on Strabo says that
'the Scythian Slavs now hold all Epirus and almost all Greece, together
with the Peloponnesus and Macedonia.' [72] It must be
remembered, however, in the present connection, that Constantine V could
help restore the population of Constantinople, decimated by the plague,
by the transportation of Greeks to the capital 'from the islands and Greece
and the lower regions', (ek twn nhswn kai 'ElladoV
kai twn katwtikwn merwn). [73] The population
of Greece was far from exterminated by plagues, its cities far from destroyed
by earthquakes, and the racial characteristics of the Greek people far
from submerged in Slavism. Professor C. S. Coon has written, indeed, of
the ethnography of present day Greece: 'It is my personal reaction to the
living Greeks that their continuity with their ancestors of the ancient
world is remarkable. . . . ' [74] Be this as it may,
the strength of Greek culture was enormous. In the Tactica attributed
to Leo the Wise occurs an interesting passage on the Slavs. When the Slavs
had lived in their own country beyond the Danube, they had been free, refusing
to serve another or submit to his leadership; when they had crossed the
Danube, however, and were obliged to submit to discipline, they preferred
subjection to a ruler of their own race (fuli),
rather than to accept the rule and laws of Byzantium. A numerous people,
our informant calls them, patient and hardy, they easily endured privation.
The Emperor Basil I, with help from heaven (and from the Church), prevailed
upon them to give up their ancient ways, and having made Greeks of them
(graikwsaV), subjected them to rulers after
the Byzantine fashion, converted them to Christianity, 'and freed them
from servitude to their own rulers, and taught them to fight against peoples
hostile to the Byzantines.' [75] Nevertheless, there
were, through generations, plagues and famines, earthquakes, wars, and
barbarians. The historical picture of the Balkans and of Greece is never
a simple black-and-white drawing: rather it is a canvas crowded with too
many figures, painted with bright colors and dull ones, and marred by too
much confusion. The Avars created their full share of confusion in the
sixth and seventh centuries, and we must return to them.

When the Emperor Maurice came to the throne in August of 582, the ravages
of the Avars began again or simply continued, and Thrace suffered until
the tribute was renewed and increased, but since Maurice was constantly
occupied

512

with the Persians, Baïan continued to seek his advantage amid the
trials and troubles which harassed the Byzantine state. The Slavs were
again pushed into the Balkan provinces, sought to lay siege to Thessalonica
(586), and some of them reached the Long Wall. According, indeed, to a
notice in the twelfth-century Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, Jacobite
Patriarch of Antioch (1166-1199), the Slavs even took the city of Corinth.
[76]
In any event the Avars pillaged Moesia, but the government now turned with
surprising energy to the defense of the northern provinces, and the Slavs
were driven from Thrace, and the Avars hurled back beyond the Danube, after
being defeated in a battle at Adrianople (587). [77]
At long last, in 591, peace was made with Persia, and Maurice, free to
deal with the Avars and Slavs, placed his ablest commander Priscus in charge
of sufficient troops to meet the hordes of Baïan (592). There now
began a decade of bitter warfare during which Priscus, except for a period
in which he was relieved of his command (596-598), was charged with the
onerous task of carrying the war into the Avaric lands beyond the Danube.
[78]
Baïan is said to have set a hundred thousand Slavs, apparently already
in the peninsula, to undertake the capture of the great city of Thessalonica,
which escaped only by the miraculous intervention of St Demetrius (597),
[79] and in the years that followed Thessalonica owed
its salvation more than once to the unfailing vigilance of its militant
patron. On the other side of the peninsula, Dalmatia was threatened by
the Slavs, and Pope Gregory wrote, in July of 600, to Bishop Maximus of
Salona of the terrible anxiety he felt in behalf of the bishop and his
flock. Gregory also mentioned that the Slavs were finding their way into
Italy. [80]

Other Byzantine successes were achieved, with or without celestial assistance,
and in 600 a truce was arranged between the Avars and the imperial government,
which neither side intended to keep, but according to which the Danube
was declared to be the boundary separating their respective lands, and
another tribute of 20,000 pieces of gold was to be paid to the Avars. [81]
But the war was renewed in the following year, and Priscus now crossed
the Danube in force, carried the war to Baïan, diminished his strength
in five fierce encounters, and finally thrust the Avars beyond the river
Theiss. Avaric power seemed to have been reduced to the point of dissolution
when the victorious Priscus was once more relieved of his command by the
Emperor Maurice, early in 602, and the mutiny, some months later, of part
of the army on the Danube resulted in the fall and death of Maurice in
November of 602. [82]

The wretched rule of the tyrant Phocas prolonged the period of Avaric
strength in the Balkans and moved the Persians to renewed attacks upon
the eastern possessions of the Empire. [83] Although
the great Heraclius succeeded Phocas in October of 610, the fragmentation
of imperial authority in the eastern provinces, once begun, proved impossible
to check. A decade of disaster followed; the story is too well known to
bear retelling here. Syria and Palestine fell to the Persians; Asia Minor
was overrun, Chalcedon becoming a Persian outpost; and Egypt, the granary
of the capital, passed under Persian control when Alexandria was captured
(618-619). [84] The Danube frontier could not be maintained,
and the apparent powerlessness of the imperial government made inevitable
further

513

irruptions of the Slavs and Avars. The new Avaric Khagan, a son of the
redoubtable Baïan, was looking upon the walls of Constantinople on
5 June 617, and the environs of the capital were pillaged, especially the
suburb of Blachernae. [85] But the zeal and courage
of Heraclius entirely justified his elevation to the imperial throne. He
planned and prepared for months and years, with the aid of the Patriarch
Sergius, for those great campaigns which were to destroy for ever the power
of the Sassanids and Persia (622-629). Chosroes II, whom the world had
come to look upon in the second decade of the century as a Cyrus or Darius
or at least a Shapur, now experienced an anxiety which gradually mounted
into desperation, as he contemplated the effects and the possibilities
of Heraclius' brilliant offensive. In an effort to divert the Emperor's
attention and to deflect some of his blows, Chosroes effected, in 626,
a military rapprochement with the Avars, who advanced once more to the
walls of Constantinople in June of this year, but the Avaric attacks upon
the capital were repulsed (29 July-7 August 626), and the Khagan abandoned
the last Avaric siege of the great city, [86] and prayers
of thanksgiving were offered up within the walls which had withstood the
assault, for the Panagia of Blachernae had not abandoned her people during
those days of direst peril. [87] For almost sixty years
the Avars had been an almost annual menace to the Balkan provinces, but
after 626 their decline was rapid, [88] and other enemies,
most notably the Arabs, came to occupy the chief attention of the Byzantine
Emperor and the Empire.

After 626 the Slavs and Bulgars were also free of subjection to the
Avars, who were now contained by the forces of the famous Samo (623-658),
Frankish ruler of the new Slavic empire in the west, [89]
and by those of Kovrat, Khan of the Bulgars in the east, the latter being
allied withHeraclius from 635-636. [90] Heraclius was,
of course, unable to drive the Slavic peoples from his northern Balkan
provinces, where they had settled in permanent habitations from the time
of the Emperors Maurice and Phocas. Moreover, there is a legend to the
effect that he settled the Croats and Serbs, apparently the same people,
in Dalmatia, Illyricuni, and Pannonia, in order to help the imperial government
to hold the Avars in check. [91] This legend may be
true.

It is now time to deal with some other texts, more difficult to work
with than Menander and Evagrius, concerning the Avaro-Slavic attacks upon
Greece, for they gave rise to much controversy in the nineteenth century,
'and the report was long believed that the Avars occupied the Peloponnesus
for 218 years [i.e. about 587-805], so that no Roman durst enter it.' [92]
Thus a synodal letter of the Patriarch Nicholas III Grammaticus (1084-1111),
addressed in 1084 to the Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, and dealing with the
rights of metropolitans over suffragan bishoprics, declares that the Emperor
Nicephorus I (802-811) granted metropolitical authority to the archiepiscopal
see of Patras over certain bishoprics, because of the miraculous intervention
of St Andrew, chief of the Apostles and patron saint of Patras, after the
catastrophic success of the Avars had wrenched the whole of the Peloponnesus
from Roman control for two hundred and eighteen years, 'so that no Roman
could even set foot in the Peloponnesus,' but in a single hour the Avars
were crushed when St Andrew appeared,

514

and the whole territory was thus restored to Roman rule. [93]
This happened in 805 or, possibly, in 807. We have a detailed account of
St Andrew's raising of the siege of Patras in Constantine Porphyrogenitus,
and it is not often that such a good story is so well told: While Nicephorus
I was Emperor, the Slavs in the Peloponnesus planned and executed an attack
upon their Greek neighbors. They laid siege to the city of Patras, 'having
with them both Africans and Saracens.' The inhabitants of the city soon
felt the effects of hunger and thirst. Since, however, the governor (strathgoV)
of the province (Qema) was then in the castle
of Corinth (en kastrw Korinqou) [94]
and had been informed of the irruption of the Slavs, the Patrenses expected
immediate aid from him, and so sent a scout to discover whether he was
already on his way to assist them. If the governor was on his way, the
scout was to let the besieged know by inclining his banner as he returned;
otherwise he was to hold the banner up high, so that the Patrenses need
not continue to look for help from that quarter. The scout departed. He
was soon returning with his banner held aloft, for he had not seen the
governor coming with help for the imperilled city. By the will of God,
however, and at the intercession of St Andrew the Apostle, his horse stumbled;
the banner was abruptly lowered; the Patrenses believed that help was coming,
and so they made a sortie from their walls against the Slavs. Help was
indeed coming, for St Andrew was now seen clearly, mounted on horseback,
charging upon the barbarians, who were overwhelmed with terror, and fled
pell mell from the city they had hoped to take. St Andrew had saved Patras.
Three days later the governor arrived; he was told of the exploit of the
Apostle, and rendered a full account thereof to the Emperor Nicephorus.
The Emperor ordered that the Slavs should be assigned to the (now) metropolitan
Church of Patras, and promulgated a decree to this effect (dedwkwV
peri eutwn kai siggilion). Constantine Porphyrogenitus, however,
now goes out of his way to declare that there was no written record of
these events — having just mentioned the imperial 'seal,' which was apparently
still extant in the eleventh century, for the Patriarch Nicholas III alludes
to it and some later confirmations of it — the elders of Patras had simply
informed their children of that eventful day, so that each generation might
know of the miracle thus wrought by the Apostle, and might not forget the
benefits which God had bestowed upon them by his intercession. [95]
The letter of the Patriarch Nicholas III states, as we have seen, that
St Andrew's activity brought immediately to an end 218 years of Avaric
domination in the Peloponnesus; this was an important text for Fallmerayer,
and he dated the Avaro-Slavic destruction of ancient Greece from 588-589,
[96]
which thus accorded with St Andrew's appearance at Patras and the Byzantine
recovery of the whole region in the year 807.
[97] (As
a result of his contentions Fallmerayer met a shower of abuse from the
newspapers during a stay in Athens, and, what was more serious for him,
certain diplomatic circles took a dim view of an historian who, in the
years following the peace of Adrianople, declared the Greeks, as Slavs,
to be close cousins of the Russians. [98]) Zinkeisen
soon disputed Fallmerayer's general view, but he did not venture to impugn
the validity of the Patriarch Nicholas's evidence so much as to assert
that the passing of persons

515

and things Hellenic was achieved by a process of general liquidation
rather than of quick destruction. [99] The great Greek
nationalist historian Const. Paparrigopoulo next sought to show that the
letter of the Patriarch Nicholas was based upon the historian Evagrius.
[100]
It obviously stems, however, from the historical record or tradition, to
which we shall come in a moment, of which the Chronicle of Monemvasia
and an intriguing Scholium, written in 932, of Arethas of Caesarea are
a part. [101] The views of these early scholars still
retain a peculiar interest, but they have become, by and large, rather
a part of the history of scholarship than of scholarly history. We have
seen something of the extent and character of the great Avaro-Slavic irruption
of 578-585, described by Menander Protector, Evagrius, John of Ephesus,
and others, an event of high importance for the subsequent history of Greece.
Although we may, and perhaps truly, claim to understand the nature and
effects of the barbarian irruptions into the Balkan provinces and Greece
rather better today than our predecessors in the nineteenth century, we
must inevitably entertain grave misgivings on the score of any reconstruction
of events that we may be able to make on the basis of the confused medley
of facts at our disposal. The problem of the Peloponnesus remains especially
baffling. Interest in the alleged Avaro-Slavic occupation of the Peloponnesus,
and settlement therein, has in no way diminished with the passing of the
years, and it has been treated in several recent studies.
[102]
One of the chief sources, concerning which much doubt is still entertained,
is the now almost famous, but apparently misnamed,
Chronicle of Monemvasia.
The text of this chronicle now survives in three or four versions. The
earliest known version was published in 1749 from a manuscript in the library
of the University of Turin by Giuseppe Passini and his colleagues Rivautella
and Berta. [103] The Turin text (designated T) was
republished in 1884 by Sp. P. Lampros, who also edited two other versions
of the Chronicle which he discovered in two manuscripts in monasteries
on Mt Athos, which manuscripts are designated by the names of the monasteries
to which they belonged. One of these texts is called the Koutloumousiac,
i.e., of Kutlumus (K), which supplies a text very similar to the Turin
manuscript (T), while the other Athonite text (from the monastery of Iveron),
known as the Iberitikon (7), is a more detailed version of the original
source, and does not extend in its content beyond the first decade of the
ninth century. The I text is apparently complete in itself, however, and
not a broken fragment; it ends, as it was presumably intended to end, with
a doxology. [104] All three texts were republished,
with some emendations, by Professor N. A. Bees in 1909. [105]
The manuscript in Turin and that in Kutlumus furnish us with versions of
the Chronicle obviously written between 1340, the date of the last
event mentioned in T and K, and the sixteenth century, the date, by and
large, of the manuscripts themselves.
[106] In 1912
Professor Lampros published a fourth version from a manuscript in the Gregorian
College in Rome (designated R). A dozen paper pages, from the sixteenth
(or fifteenth) century, prefixed to a thirteenth-century manuscript on
parchment, contain the last third of the Chronicle (on pp. 11 r
f.). [107] We have, then, these four versions of the
Chronicle,
three of which (T, K, and R) are much the same, although R possesses

516

only the material in the last third of T and K. The remaining text,
I,
stands apart from the other three; and, as we have noted, it is the most
complete of the four versions for the period which it covers.

There has been some controversy concerning the Iberitikon. Professor
Lampros asserted that I belonged to an older tradition than T, K,
and R, having been based upon some earlier collection of historical materials,
[108]
while Professor Bees was formerly inclined to assign its redaction to the
Peloponnesian family of the Likinioi in the fifteenth century. [109]
Professor S. B. Kougeas, having discovered that a lengthy passage in the
Chronicle)
largely dealing with the alleged Avaro-Slavic occupation of the Peloponnesus,
was almost word for word the same as a scholium written by Arethas of Caesarea
in 932, came to the conclusion that the Chronicle (version I)
was written during or immediately after the reign of Nicephorus II Phocas
(963-969). [110] Before we proceed any farther, it
may be well to say just a word about Arethas of Caesarea, who has been
the subject of considerable interest in late years. He was born in Patras,
perhaps about 850, and became, rather early in the tenth century, Bishop
of Caesarea in Cappadocia. He had been, like many of his learned contemporaries,
a student of Photius, and possessed an intelligent interest in classical
literature and theology. He was also, be it noted again for future reference,
a native of Patras. [111]

The text of the Iberitikon, or I version of the so-called Chronicle
of Monemvasia, is the one upon which chief dependence must be placed
for such information as this work supplies us for the alleged Avaro-Slavic
invasion of, and settlement in, the Peloponnesus. A common source seems
to lie behind the Chronicle of Monemvasia (especially version I),
the Scholium of Arethas, the letter of the Patriarch Nicholas III, and,
conceivably, the Monemvasiote petition of 1429. [112]
Lampros, however, has called attention to the division of the material
in versions T and K into three parts: 1) the history of the Avars up to
the reign of Maurice; 2) the description of the attack of the Avars and
Slavs upon the Peloponnesus, together with their conversion to Christianity
by the Emperor Nicephorus I and some notices concerning the church of Patras
until Nicephorus' time; and 3) the notices concerning the metropolitan
churches of Monemvasia and Lacedaemonia. Of the three parts possessed by
both T and K, R has only the third part, and I has only the first
two parts. There is a very definite break here, suggesting, as Lampros
says, ta duo prwta sunaphrtisan en palaioterioV cronoiV
to olon, that these two first parts had previously constituted the
whole, the third part of T and K and the material in R being obviously
a later addition. The I version thus seems to represent, without
doubt, the older form of the so-called Chronicle. [113]
Most scholars have discarded the Chronicle of Monemvasia as a source
of dubious value, and, even since Kougeas has thrust its date back into
the tenth century, have regarded it as being untrustworthy in its record
of an Avaro-Slavic occupation of the Peloponnesus. Professor Peter Charanis,
however, has recently asserted that, since the publication by Kougeas (in
1912) of the Scholium of Arethas written in 932, Vhich confirms, as far
as it goes, almost word for word what the chronicle has to say . . . ,
there remains virtually nothing

517

in the chronicle that cannot be confirmed by other sources, and it can
now be affirmed in unmistakable and unambiguous terms that the Chronicle
of Monemvasia is absolutely trustworthy and constitutes one of the
most precious sources of the history of the Byzantine Empire.' [114]
The present writer believes that this extreme and categorical statement
is unwarranted; [115] he does, however, agree with
Charanis to the extent of seeing an historical substance of some importance,
at least, in the so-called Chronicle of Monemvasia. It is, however,
ludicrous to believe in an Avaro-Slavic domination of the Peloponnesus
that endured for 218 years. The Scholium of Arethas and the Chronicle
are derived, as we have noted, from a common source, a written chronicle,
presumably, itself based upon Menander Protector, Evagrius, Theophanes,
and Theophylact Simocatta, together with at least one unknown source, which
we may call, for convenience, Q. [116] It is from Q
that the statement comes that the Avars took possession of the Peloponnesus,
settled in it, and prolonged their rule over it for 218 years, obeying
neither the Roman emperor or any other person. [117]
It is, therefore, from Q that the '218 years' passed, in one way or another,
into our unknown chronicle, whence it passed into Arethas, the Chronicle
of Monemvasia, the letter of the Patriarch Nicholas III, and into the
works of Fallmerayer and our modern literature. But what was the nature
of Q? This we do not know, but I think that something may be suggested
as to its provenience, if not as to its nature. Arethas, who knows Q, most
likely indirectly through our assumed chronicle, was a native of Patras.
The Patriarch Nicholas III employs the statement emanating from Q in his
assertion of the metropolitical rights of Patras. The Avaric or Avaro-Slavic
domination of the western Peloponnesus is said to have come to an end,
after 218 years, with the Byzantine reconquest of Patras. Clearly the place
to look for Q is Patras. Q could, of course, be a life of the Apostle St
Andrew, patron and savior of Patras. It is also barely conceivable that
Q could be a chrysobull, genuine or spurious, whereby Nicephorus I was
said to have raised Patras to metropolitan rank, [118]
and to have extended its authority, as indicated by Arethas, the Chronicle
of Monemvasia, and the Patriarch Nicholas III. Q could be a forgery
of ecclesiastical origin, perpetrated by or in behalf of the Metropolitan
of Patras. One immediately recalls, in the west, how Constantine the Great
bestowed the patrimony of St Peter upon Pope Sylvester as well as other
'pious forgeries,' like the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, in which ambitious
churchmen in the eighth and ninth centuries sought to give legal effect
to actual or desired conditions. This is submitted merely as a bare possibility.
Nothing is here affirmed beyond the high probability that Q must be associated
with Patras, but we still do not know the nature of Q — nor, of course,
the extent of its trustworthiness. Charanis should not regard such a source
as 'absolutely trustworthy.' The Chronicle of Monemvasia seems,
in fact, to be a medley of some fact and some fiction. It should be used
with caution.

Both the Chronicle and the Scholium of Arethas contain, in more
or less parallel accounts, a description of the Avaric or Avaro-Slavic
invasions — in the time of the Emperor Maurice — of Thrace, Macedonia,
Thessaly, Epirus, the island of Euboea, and Attica, after which the Avars
'launched an attack on

518

the Peloponnesus, seized it, and driving out and destroying the Greek
peoples of noble lineage, they themselves settled down in the land.' [119]
The Chronicle expressly states, concerning the Avars, that 'those
who could escape their bloodstained hands fled, some to one place, some
to another.' [120] All the Greeks, therefore, in the
(western) Peloponnesus, according to the Chronicle, either fled
or were killed. This is absurd. However, the natives of Patras fled to
Rhegium in Calabria; the Argives went to the island called Orobe [but Euboea
was already devastated]; and the Corinthians are declared to have sought
refuge on the island of Aegina. The Laconians abandoned their native soil,
and some sailed off to Sicily, 'and they are still there in a place called
Demena, and are called Demenitae instead of Lacedaemonians [Demenitai
anti Lakedaimonitwn katonomazomenoi], and they still preserve their
native Laconian speech.' Other Laconians discovered an inaccessible place
on the seashore, where they built a strong city which they called Monemvasia
because it had but one approach from the land [i.e., monh
embasiV], and they settled in this city with their own bishop. [121]
'Thus the Avars occupied the Peloponnesus, settled there, and prolonged
their rule over the land for two hundred and eighteen years, subject neither
to the Roman Emperor nor to anyone else, that is to say from the 6096th
year of the Creation, which is the sixth year of the reign of Maurice (A.D.
587-588), until the year 6313, which is the fourth year of the reign of
the elder Nicephorus (A.D. 805-806) . . . ,' [122]
'Only the eastern part of the Peloponnesus from Corinth to Cape Malea,
because it is rugged and inaccessible [which, for the most part, it is
not] remained free from the Slavs, [123] and the Emperor
continued to send a governor to this region.' One of these governors, a
man from Lesser Armenia, who belonged to the family of the Skleroi, becoming
embroiled with the Slavs, conquered them and destroyed them completely
[. . . sumbalwn tw Sqlabhnw eqnei polemikoV eile te
kai hfanise], and thus made possible the restoration of their own
lands to the original inhabitants. [124] When the Emperor
Nicephorus was informed of Skleros' victory over the Slavs, he was overjoyed,
and immediately planned the re-establishment of the cities and churches
destroyed by the barbarians, 'and to make Christians of the barbarians
themselves' [whom Skleros had already 'destroyed completely']. Nicephorus
resettled the Patrenses, who had so long lived in Rhegium in Calabria,
in their ancient city of Patras, together with their pastor Athanasius:
Patras and its churches were thus reconstructed while Tarasius (died 18
February 806) was still Patriarch of Constantinople. Lacedaemon was also
rebuilt and was repeopled with Kapheroi, Thracesians, Ar-meniacs, and others
assembled from diverse places. Reorganized as a bishopric, Lacedaemon was
made suffragan to the new Metropolitan of Patras. [125]

It has been claimed that Navarino, scene of one of the most memorable
events in the modern history of Greece, preserves to this day the name
and memory of the Avars in Messenia: this is apparently an erroneous derivation
([N] Avarinos), but in any event the name Navarino is of Slavic
origin (*Avorbno, [a place of] 'maples'?), and is one of hundreds
of such place names, recently treated for us by Professor Max Vasmer, which
testify to the presence of the Slavs both in continental Greece and the
Morea. [126]

519

The raising of Patras to metropolitan status, as described by Arethas,
the Chronicle, and the Patriarch Nicholas III, would be a most important
change in the ecclesiastical organization of Greece. It would break the
predominant position of the Church of Corinth, but this would probably
make little difference to the Corinthians, if we could follow our sources
to the point of believing that they fled en masse to the island
of Aegina. About two years, however, after the date of this alleged Avaro-Slavic
invasion of the Peloponnesus, and the occupation of Corinth, Pope Gregory
the Great, in February 591, wrote the Archbishop Anastasius of Corinth
of his elevation to the Holy See, [127] and some four
years later, in July 595, we find Gregory writing to John, Anastasius'
successor as Archbishop of Corinth. [128] Although
Pope Gregory seems well informed concerning the affairs of the Church of
Corinth, and holds up to opprobrium the Archbishop Anastasius, whose conduct
he had had investigated by one Secundinus, he does not mention the disaster
which our sources declare to have fallen upon the city: if Corinth had
been taken by the Avars, Gregory would have known it; if he had known it,
he would not have failed to mention it; we are, therefore, forced to the
conclusion that Arethas and the Chronicle are not here dealing with
fact, but have deviated into fancy. It was apparently very easy for a Roman
'to set foot in the Peloponnesus,' in the very decade following the alleged
Avaro-Slavic invasion of 588. [129] We may follow the
history of the Corinthian Church in after years a bit farther, but a mere
list of names, dates, and unrelated facts do not supply the materials from
which intelligible — or at least reliable — history can be written. Thus
we know that Stephen, Bishop of Corinth, was present at the Sixth Oecumenical
Council held in Constantinople in 680-681, [130] but
Corinth was apparently not represented at Nicaea at the Seventh (787),
[131]
although the Metropolitan Hilarion of Corinth appears at the famous ninth
session of the Eighth Oecumenical Council (12 February 870), [132]
and his signature appears among those who subscribed to the acts of the
Council. [133] However, despite the continuance of
Corinth as a metropolitan center, in the ecclesiastical sense, Patras does
seem to have been elevated to metropolitan rank during the reign of the
Emperor Nicephorus I, [134] and there are reasons for
believing that Athens was also made a metropolis about the same time, for
the Abbot Hilduin of St Denis, who was writing about the year 835, and
could have got his information from the Byzantine embassies sent to the
court of Louis the Pious in 824 and 827, [135] says
that Athens was made a metropolis during the patriarchate of Tarasius (784-806).
[136]
Even a superficial comparison of what is said concerning the freeing of
Patras from the Slavs in the accounts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus on
the one hand and Arethas and the Chronicle of Monemvasia on the
other reveals some serious discrepancies, which the reader will doubtless
have noted, and so it seems best to acknowledge that we do not have precise
knowledge of what led to the elevation of the see of Patras to metropolitan
rank, although the fact was attested by imperial
sigillia apparently
still extant in the time of the Patriarch Nicholas III. The new status
of Patras was probably necessitated by the ecclesiastical reorganization
of Greece, of which the similar elevation of Athens was also a part. There
is very likely some truth in the account furnished

520

us by Arethas and the author of the Monemvasiote Chronicle, but it stands
rather like wreckage cast upon the shore, and the historian should not
seek in this case, any more than the beachcomber, to reproduce the lines
of the ship from the battered remains of the pilot-house and the quarter-deck.

To most modern historians, therefore, this story of the Avaro-Slavic
occupation of the Peloponnesus has been unconvincing. Professor Zakythinos
has very recently refused to place any credence in it, and, years ago,
Gregorovius wrote: 'The barbarians never possessed Corinth and Patras,
Nauplion and Argos, Chalcis, Thebes, and Athens. There always maintained
themselves, in these places, Byzantine authority and the Greek people.'
[137]
It has been recently asserted, however, that archaeological evidence confirms,
to some extent, the statements in the
Chronicle of Monemvasia, especially
as to the Greek abandonment of Corinth. Some very important finds of apparently
non-Byzantine origin, such as buckles, weapons, ornaments and the like,
have been made in two graves which were discovered some years ago in a
square tower below the west entrance to Acrocorinth, and the same sorts
of things have been found on various other sites in and around Corinth.
These buckles, weapons and ornaments date from the first half of the seventh
century, and are exactly like those familiar from similar graves of the
same era which have been excavated at Keszthely, on the western end of
Lake Balaton, in Hungary.
[138]

It has been suggested that the finds at Corinth are from the graves
of Kutrigur (i.e., Bulgar) warriors, whom the Avars might have forced to
precede them in battle, or might have sent on an advance raid, as Menander
describes the Khagan Baïan doing in a great campaign. [139]
In any event these graves do not seem to be those of Avars (often difficult
to tell from Kutriguric graves in Hungary), and no evidence seems to be
forthcoming of Avaric burials at Corinth. [140]

The evidence then points to the Corinthian graves as containing the
bodies of Bulgaric warriors. Horvath has identified them as Kutrigurs,
although it seems better to me to regard them as Onogurs, since Isidore
of Kiev obviously preserves a reminiscence of a Peloponnesian tradition
to precisely this effect, which he may have found in a literary source
no longer extant, but which he has, unfortunately, carelessly adapted to
his argument in the Monemvasiote petition of 1429. [141]
In any event, in the time from which these graves date, the Onogur prince
Kovrat ruled over the Kutrigurs as well as over the Onogurs, and some of
his people were apparently settled in the plain of Monastir. There is another
text in the petition of 1429 relating to the fall of Corinth, which we
had best consider at this point, both because of its great interest and
because Professor Zakythinos has irrelevantly associated it with the Avaro-Slavic
or Onoguric attacks upon Corinth.

The text in question is cited by Isidore from the act of the Holy Synod
of 1397, whereby Maine and Zemena were to be taken from Monemvasia and
restored to Corinth (the Praxis of Corinth): the synodal act itself
quotes this text, however, from an 'old manuscript,’ produced at the Synod
in 1397, and said to date back to the elevation of Monemvasia to metropolitan
rank (which would make the 'old manuscript' no older than 1261): 'The most
holy metropolis

521

of Corinth,' runs the tenor of the old manuscript, 'having fallen by
siege, and its inhabitants having been scattered everywhere, the then Bishop
of Monemvasia — for this was previously a bishopric of Corinth [as the
Greek taktika amply testify] — displaying every zeal, not only saved
some of the Corinthians and settled them in the Peloponnesus, but also,
having summoned many others of the inhabitants, he settled them there in
various places [egkatesoeire tauth], and thus
again did he colonize the Peloponnesus.' [142] The
old manuscript attributes these events to the Fourth Crusade. [143]
The whole picture is not easy to reconcile with what we know of Moreote
history following the Fourth Crusade, which may have led Zakythinos, nodding
for a moment, to associate this statement with the alleged Avaro-Slavic
attack upon Corinth. [144] Corinth fell to Geoffrey
I de Ville-hardouin in 1210, after a five years' siege; the Greeks had
already removed the treasure of the Corinthian Church to Argos (which also
fell in 1212); it is quite probable that some Corinthians did flee to Monemvasia
in 1210, but the city of Corinth was far from being abandoned, and remained
through the thirteenth century a rather active commercial center. [145]
Monemvasia did not fall to the Latins until 1248, but its Bishop was never
in any position, during the years preceding, to 'colonize the Peloponnesus,'
which was almost entirely in Latin hands. After 1261, however, when Monemvasia
was recovered by Michael VIII Palaeologus, and raised to metropolitan rank,
the Metropolitan of Monemvasia would be in a position to help decolonize'
the Peloponnesus. It is to the beginning years of the Greek Reconquista,
then, that the 'old manuscript' refers; it has nothing to do with Avars
and Bulgars, of course, and it has nothing directly to do with the Fourth
Crusade. [146] The text in question has carried us
six centuries from our subject, but some brief comment upon it has seemed
necessary.

The finds made in the two Corinthian graves, which we had been discussing
before the preceding digression, seem to me to indicate a Bulgaric attack
upon the city in the first half of the seventh century, and the historical
record and numismatics may allow us to fix this attack, and perhaps a brief
period of occupation, about the middle of the century, very likely in the
late 640's. Professor Gregoire has recently made Kovrat, the Onogur Khan,
the subject of a most interesting paper. [147] Gregoire
has demonstrated, again, that Kovrat (or Kubrat) led the Croats — and Serbs
— against the Avars, and is the eponymous hero from whom the Croats derived
their name (Crobatoi); he has now established
beyond much doubt that the Kouver (Kouber) of
the Acta or Miracula S. Demetrii Martyris is the Onogur Kovrat,
as Th. Uspenskii and Lubor Niederle had already asserted, and that the
Onogurs and their Khan were very active in the northern Balkan provinces
of the Empire, [148] as we have already had ample occasion
to observe. Kovrat had negotiated an alliance in 635-636, when he struck
at the Avars, with the Emperor Heraclius, whom he had known since 619:
we are expressly told that this Bulgaro-Byzantine alliance lasted until
Heraclius's death in 641. [149] In fact, it led Kovrat
to support Heraclius's widow, the Empress Martina, against Constantine
III and his son Constans II. Thus, previously the ally of the Byzantine
government, Kovrat became an enemy in 641-642, a threat to Constantinople
and to Thessalonica. [150]

It was some time after 641-642 that a detachment of Onogur Bulgars,
whether

522

under, conceivably, one of the sons of Kovrat, or under some other lieutenant,
attacked and captured Corinth. It is the remains of these warriors, their
weapons and ornaments, that have been discovered, I believe, in the graves
at Corinth, marked as Nos. II and III by Miss Davidson. [151]
Isidore
of Kiev's statement possesses archaeological confirmation. It was also
at the time of the Onogur occupation of Corinth, apparently, that the Corinthians
were, for the most part, dispersed, and presumably settled in various places
in the Peloponnesus. Numismatic evidence, as we shall see, suggests that
the Onogurs could not have held Corinth much more than fifteen years or
so, if indeed they held the city that long. If the present reconstruction
of events is acceptable, we may believe that the Onogurs were expelled
from
Corinth by the Emperor Constans II. Constans is known to have made an expedition,
in 657-658, 'into Sclavinia, and he took many prisoners, and subdued the
land.' [152] M. Brehier states, simply and truly, 'On
ignore dans quelle region eut lieu cette expedition. On suppose qu'elle
degagea Thessalonique.' [153] It is tempting to believe
that in Theophanes' reference to the expedition of 657-658 'Sclavinia'
means the Peloponnesus, as Hopf, Zakythinos and others have tried to interpret
the word in another passage in Theophanes.
[154] I
do not succumb to the temptation, but I believe it to be most likely that
one effect of part, at least, of the military preparations of 657-658 was
the relief of Corinth, which must have suffered so much from its capture
by the Onogurs and its recapture by the Byzantines that it may have ceased
to exist as an inhabited community. The archaeological evidence suggests
that Corinth was deserted some time in the first half of the seventh century,
but the numismatic evidence enables us, I think, to fix the date of the
virtual abandonment of Corinth precisely in the reign of Constans II. Coins
of Constans II which have been found at Corinth are more numerous than
those of any other emperor since the reign of Justin II (d. 578); this
is quite intelligible if he or some of his commanders actually made an
appearance here; following Constans II there is a very sudden falling off
in the numbers of Byzantine coins recovered, and those of Constans' own
successor, Constantine IV (668-685), are very rare; in fact, 'the reigns
of the eighteen emperors who ruled between the years 668 (the first year
of Constantine IV) and 829 (the last year of Michael II) have yielded only
sixteen coins [up to 1937].' [155] Coins from the first
half of the seventh century have thus been found in rather large numbers,
but chiefly on Acrocorinth (they are rare in the lower town), indicating
that this period was one of danger in Corinth, and that the inhabitants
dwelt within the protection of the precipitous heights of the citadel.
In the lower town, however, coins are found from the first half of the
ninth century, but rarely, it is striking to note, in the upper town, suggesting
that, contrary to the account in Constantine Porphyrogenitus, there was
no military commandant and garrison on Acrocorinth in 805-807 at the time
of St Andrew's defeat of the Slavs. There is thus some reason to believe
that Acrocorinth was not the location of a garrison command in the late
eighth and earlier ninth centuries, but, from the reappearance of the coins,
was re-established as such in the time of Leo VI (886-912), 'the remnants
of the Byzantine buildings destroyed by the Slavs [or, as I think, by the
Bulgars] furnishing the necessary

BELT BUCKLES FROM ATHENS.
The second and third buckles of the top row (American Agora Collection,
inventory numbers and B509 respectively), which are the same as some of
the buckles found at Corinth, are regarded in the present study as Bulgaric.
(The photograph was taken by Miss Alison Frantz.)

523

materials.' [156] Following the expulsion of the
Onogur Bulgars Corinth was a deserted village.

We may pursue, just a bit farther, the belief that Constans II expelled
the Onogurs from what was left of Corinth, and that the expedition of 657-658,
which may have also driven the Slavs (and Bulgars?) from Thessalonica,
included a plan, which was successfully executed, to regain Corinth. Two
years later, in 660, Constans II left Constantinople for the last time,
for his great enterprise in southern Italy and Sicily. In 660-661, however,
before his departure for the west, Constans II lived for a considerable
time in Thessalonica and Athens (662), the two places where he might check
up on the final results of the expedition of two years before. [157]

Certain buckles found at Corinth seem to me to be peculiarly interesting
in the present connection, for I believe them to be the buckles which fitted
on the 'Bulgarian belts' referred to in two very important contemporary
texts. These belts were worn, as we shall see, by Byzantine soldiers in
the time of Constans II — one of those barbarian fashions so obnoxious
to Roman patriots from the time of the first Augustus — and they were also,
a
fortiori, worn by the Bulgars. Buckles like those in the graves at
Corinth have been found with suspicious regularity along the entire route
of Constans II. The latter, as is well known, fought with the Lombards
in Italy; plundered Rome (as Johannes Diaconus tells us) for twelve days;
and thereafter went on to Sicily, where he was finally murdered, in Syracuse,
on 15 July 668. [158] Bulgaric buckles, let us call
them so for the moment, have been found not only in Corinth, but also in
Thessalonica, in Athens (one of the two Athenian buckles bearing a Christian
monogram), and at Aphiona on the island of Corfu. [159]
Similar buckles have been found in Lombard graves in Italy, and others,
with a Christian monogram, very like the one in Athens, have also been
found in Sicily, at Taormina and at Syracuse. [160]
Taormina is not far north of Syracuse, and it lies on the coast road from
Messina, a road much used by the soldiers of the Emperor Constans II, who
lived himself at Syracuse. The Emperor's route, then, from Constantinople
to Tarentum — for our sources all mention that he hugged the shore — lay
through Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, and Corfu, thence into southern
Italy, and finally into eastern Sicily: in all these places we find Bulgaric
buckles. [161] Indeed, aside from the buckles found,
as we have noted, in graves in Hungary, and an occasional find in the Crimea,
near the old homeland of the Bulgars, the buckles found along the route
of Constans II include, perhaps, most of the examples thus far known to
us, for the rare discovery of such a buckle in southern Spain or in a German
grave will be explained by the tricks of fortune to which any little object
is so easily exposed. It remains, however, to answer the questions why
these buckles should be regarded as Bulgaric if Byzantine soldiers wore
them, and why they should be so comparatively numerous along the route
travelled by Constans II. Two important contemporary texts, which have
not yet, as far as I know, been brought into connection with these buckles
of much-disputed origin, will help answer the first question, after which
we may proceed to the second.

A Vienna papyrus from the Fayum in Egypt (P. Erzherzog Rainer, inv.
no.

524

gr. 2132 [347]) contains the receipt of a Byzantine commander (strathlathV)
named Cyril, confirming the delivery of a certain number of 'Bulgarian
belts' (boulgarik[ou karta]lamiou), which would
imply, I should think, the accompaniment of 'Bulgarian buckles.' [162]
This papyrus is to be dated in the early seventh century; it must, of course,
antedate the Arabic occupation of Egypt (641). It comes, in other words,
from almost exactly the same period as the buckles found at Corinth, and
it was not without some astonishment that I learned that a buckle similar
to those found at Corinth was actually discovered in the Egyptian Fayum.
[163]
Furthermore, Professor Moravcsik supplies us with a text from the Tactica
of the Pseudo-Maurice, also be to assigned to the end of the sixth or the
early seventh century (again, be it observed, the same date as the Corinthian
buckles) : the Pseudo-Maurice prescribes the wearing by foot-soldiers of
'simple belts, and not Bulgarian belts, and military cloaks' (zwnaria
de lita kai ou boulgarika, sagia). [164]

Thus we find a Byzantine military writer condemning the use of Bulgarian
belts and a Byzantine military commander purchasing them, the latter in
the restricted area of the Fayum, where one of the buckles under discussion
has been found. Professor Hans Zeiss, as we have had occasion more than
once to observe in our notes, believes that all these buckles are of Byzantine
origin; although some of them may well be of Byzantine manufacture, their
origin appears to have been Bulgarian, if there is truth in the suggestion
that these buckles go with the 'Bulgarian belts' mentioned in the Erzherzog
Rainer Papyrus and in the Tactica of the Pseudo-Maurice. If the
Greeks wore Bulgarian belts, so, a fortiori, did the Bulgars : if
the French export perfume, they also use it. However, these buckles are
so peculiarly numerous along the route of the Emperor Constans II, to seek
the answer to the second question asked above, because Constans was in
direct contact with the Bulgars at Thessalonica, possibly at Athens, and
finally at Corinth, where he left behind him also, as a memento of his
presence, the unusually large number of his coins which the archaeologists
have found there, and some of the buckles found in Lombard graves in central
and southern Italy and in other graves in Sicily are buckles acquired by
Byzantine soldiers in this campaign against the Bulgars in Greece. We must
remember, too, that Constans II had an especial reason for hating the Onogur
Bulgars, for their Khan Kovrat, as we have seen, had sought to aid the
widow of Heraclius to exclude him from the throne in 641-642. 1 should
never have suggested a Bulgaric occupation of Corinth on the archaeological
evidence alone; this evidence gains in significance, nevertheless, when
it is put into its place in the pattern of known historical events. The
Corinthian graves are those of soldiers (weapons were found with them)
; Miss Davidson and Dr Horvath have believed them not to be Byzantine.
The historical record, in my opinion, confirms their belief. (My reasons
for believing in the Bulgaric occupation of Corinth would not be invalidated,
however, if the Corinthian graves were actually those of Byzantine soldiers
wearing the apparel of which the Pseudo-Maurice disapproved — but this
seems in any event not to be the case.) These graves are not, however,
Avaric, as Miss Davidson has stated; nor do they seem to be those of Kutrigur

525

Bulgars, as Horvath has thought; I know of no historical evidence that
would indicate the likelihood of a Kutrigur attack upon Corinth as late
as the 640's. Professor Gregoire has shown once more that the Onogur Bulgars
were in the plain of Monastir, in continental Greece, just before the middle
of the seventh century. After the death of Heraclius there was every reason
for an Onogur attack, from that convenient location, upon what was, presumably,
the chief city of the Peloponnesus, and every reason for Constans II to
take the field in person against those who had made themselves his personal
enemies. If, as Isidore of Kiev declares, 'the Onogurs took Corinth without
a single blow,' [165] we may believe that these graves
date from the more violent Byzantine expulsion of the Onogurs in 657-658.
Be that as it may, from the obscure annals of the early mediaeval history
of Greece, Isidore preserves for us the dim memory of the Onoguric occupation
of Corinth, and it is my hope that this paper may have shown that there
is every reason for believing him.

1. The text is in Sp. P. Lampros, Duo
anaforai mhtropolitou MonembasiaV proV ton patriarchn, in the NeoV
'Ellhnomnhmon (hereafter cited as Neos Hellen.),
XII (1915), 286: . . . Ounigaroi de Makedonian kai
Qettalian kai 'Ellada kai ta entoV Qermopulwn
lhisamenoi panta kai mecri Korinqou fqasanteV, eilon paracrhma thn polin
kai autoboei. The document in which this text occurs is the second
of two petitions addressed to the Patriarch Joseph II of Constantinople;
it was published by Lampros from a fifteenth-century manuscript, Cod. Palatin.
gr. 226, 115r-133v (on which see Giovanni Mercati, Scritti d'Isidoro
il cardinale Ruteno, e codici a lui appartenuti che si conservano nella
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [Studi e Testi, 46, Rome, 1926], pp.
7-8). The claims of the archiepiscopal see of Monemvasia to metropolitical
authority over the bishopric of Maine (and that of Zemena) are asserted
in this document in opposition to those of the Metropolitan of Corinth
(cf. Neos Hellen., XII, 274 ff., 280-282, 288 ff., et passim, 308-309).
The latter claimed that the suffragan sees had been taken from him under
conditions of emergency in the past, but should now be restored to him,
for the necessity which had attached them to Monemvasia in the past no
longer obtained, and that Corinthian rights were being violated by the
continued submission of Maine to Monemvasia. The situation is as follows:
In 1395 Corinth had been reoccupied by the Greeks, under the Despot Theodore
I Palaeologus of Mistra (cf. K. M. Setton, Catalan Domination of Athens,
1311-1388, [Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1948], pp. 198-199), and the Metropolitan
Theognostus of Corinth had promptly reclaimed the ancient (Corinthian)
suffragan sees of Maine and Zemena, the latter being the modern Zemeno,
to the west of Corinth. The Holy Synod had ruled, in 1397, that, upon the
death of the Metropolitan Acacius of Monemvasia, the two sees in dispute
should return to Corinth. Acacius died in 1413, but his successor, Cyril,
reopened the case, and enlisted the services of Isidore, who prepared the
two petitions for him, from the second of which comes the text quoted above.
Isidore's venture into Corinthian history 'in the days of Justinian the
Great' preserves, I think, something of an early historical tradition,
which he has obviously and perhaps deliberately muddled, like some of his
other references, but the circumstantial exactitude of which is noteworthy,
and may be derived from a literary source no longer extant, for it is quite
apparent that Isidore read widely in the preparation of his brief. The
occupation of Corinth by the Onogurs was, of course, irrelevant to any
consideration of the elevation of Monemvasia to metropolitan rank (one
of the important issues); in the seventh century Monemvasia was a very
insignificant bishopric; the Greek taktika show Monemvasia subject to Corinth
from the beginning to the tenth century until, almost, the time of the
Fourth Crusade. Although Isidore argues that when Monemvasia fell into
the hands of Geoffrey II de Villehardouin in 1248, it was 'then a metropolis
and not a bishopric' (Neos Hellen., xn, p. 288,11.11-12), he is still in
error, although he may not have known it, but Monemvasia was almnost certainly
made a metropolis by Michael VIII Palaeologus in 1261 (Franz Dolger, Regesten
d. Kaiserurkunden d. oström.

526

Reiches, pt. 3 [1932], no. 1897a, p. 39; V. Laurent, in the Echos d'Orient,
XXIX [1930], 185; and St. Binon, ibid., XXXVII [1938], 277-278). Be all
this as it may, however, Isidore insists, most energetically, that the
establishment of Monemvasia as a metropolitan see, together with its jurisdiction
over Maine, was unconnected with the disasters which had befallen Corinth
when it was captured by the Onogurs in the seventh century ('in the days
of Justinian the Great') and, later, when it was captured by the so-called
Fourth Crusaders (in 1210). Concerning the date of the two petitions in
question, with the second and longer and more important of which we are
alone concerned, Cardinal Mercati has written: 'While the petitions, written
in the person of a Metropolitan of Monemvasia, are from about the year
1429 and consequently addressed to Joseph II, who died in Florence toward
the end of the Council, and was Patriarch from 21 May 1416 to 10 June 1439,
the petitioner is one who, not a native of the Peloponnesus, had held the
episcopacy for about 16 years or from about 1413 [Neos Hellen., XII, 277].
The time is revealed from the fact that in the petitions recent patriarchal
orders are contested, especially a synodal "sigillion" first issued thirty-two
years before, under the Patriarch Antonius (1391-1397), whereby the bishoprics
of Maine and Zemena were ordered restored to Corinth, i.e., the PraxiV
tou Karinqou of the year 1397, fortunately extant and printed in
the Acta et diplomata graeca medii aevi sacra et profana [eds. F. Miklosich
and Jos. Miiller], II [1862], 287-292. Hence, the first and principal date
— the year 1429 — which reveals the other dates . . . ' (Scritti d’Isidore,
p. 9). The petition was written for the Metropolitan by Isidore, later
Metropolitan of Kiev (1437-1442), who Mercati believes was a native of
the Peloponnesus, although he was educated in Constantinople (op. cit.,
pp. 10-14, cf. 59, 102-103). In the passage quoted above Isidore has confused
the Bulgar (Kutrigur) attacks upon the empire in 558-559 under Zabergan
[on which see, infra, p. 508] with, as I think, an Onogur attack upon Corinth
almost a century later, and has thus produced a sort of historical contaminatio,
both episodes in the drama, however, being true. Isidore 'of Kiev’ became
a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church (18 December 1439), was very active
in the service of Pope Nicholas V, and died in Rome on 23 April 1463 (see
Adolf Ziegler, Die Union des Konzils von Florenz in der russischen Kirche
[Wiirzburg, 1938], esp. pp. 56 ff.).

The name Slav (Sklabhnoi) first appears as
such in the Greek sources at the end of the first quarter of the sixth
century, in the second dialogue of the Pseudo-Caesarius of Nazianzus (Caes.,
Dial. II, Interrogatio CX, in PG 38, col. 985), on which note J. Peisker,
in Cambr. Med. Hist., II, 432; J. B. Bury, The Bulgars in the Balkans in
the Seventh Century

527

Later Roman Empire, II (1923), 292 ff.; Const. Amantos, in the Proceedings
[Praktika] of the Academy of Athens, VII (1932),
331 ff., and Max Vasmer, 'Die Slaven in Griechenland,’ in the Abhandlungen
d. preuss. Akad. d. Wissenschaften, Philos.-hist. Kl., XII (Berlin, 1941),
pp. 11-12. Bury, Vasiliev, Vasmer, Zakythinos, and most scholars today
reject as groundless the old theory of Pavel J. Safarik, Slawische Alterthumer
(trans. M. von Aehrenfeld, and ed. Heinrich Wuttke, Leipzig, 1843-1844),
I 213 ff., 245-249, and II, 159-162, and of the Bulgarian historian M.
S. Drinov, The Slavic Occupation of the Balkan Peninsula (in Russian, Moscow,
1873), that the Slavs had begun to settle in the Balkan peninsula in the
third, and even in the later second, century A.D., a theory which Const.
J. Jirecek (in his earlier work), Geschichte der Bulgaren (Prague, 1876),
p. 94, supported, asserting that Slavic inroads began in the third century,
'and continued for some four hundred years,’ In his earlier work Lubor
Niederle also accepted for the most part the theory of Safarik and Drinov
(Slov. Starozitnosti, ii [1906], 174 ff.), although he subsequently abandoned
it as untenable (Manuel, I, 59). Safarik, however, put the expansion of
the Slavs into the Peloponnesus as late as the period between 746, the
year of the famous plague, and 799, the year of the Slavic prince Akamir's
attempt to rescue the five Isaurian princes exiled by the Empress Irene
to Athens (Slawische Alterthumer, II, 192-193).

Although chiefly concerned, of course, with Bulgaro-Turkish history,
there is much recent bibliography concerning the Slavs also in the first
volume of Moravcsik's Byzantinoturcica, and numerous other works are mentioned
in the notes to the present study, although the bibliography is too vast
to seek to make notices of it anything like complete. (See, infra, especially
note 102.) There is a rather full bibliography of works published between
1918 and 1942 by Bulgarian scholars dealing with their own history, in
Ivan Dujcev, 'Die bulgarische Geschichtsforschung wahrend des letzten Vierteljahrhunderts,'
in the Sudost-Forschungen, 1942-1943 (?), pp. 546-573, with numerous notices
of works dealing with the First Bulgarian Empire (pp. 550-557). (I have
read an undated offprint of Dujcev's article very kindly loaned to me by
Professor Robert L. Wolff.)

10. A. D. Keramopoulos, The Greeks and Their
Northern Neighbors, Athens, 1945, summarized in Stilpon P. Kyriakidis,
Bulgars and Slavs in Greek History (both works in Greek, Thessalonica,
1946), pp. 7-16, and ff., derives the name Bulgars from burgarii,
bourgarioi,
i.e., those who maintain the forts,
burgi, bourgoi,
purgoi along the northern boundaries of the Balkan provinces, and
elsewhere in the empire, first mentioned in Greek in an inscription dated
A.D. 202, found between Philippopolis and Tatar Pazardzik (and last published
in Wilhelm Dittenberger's Sylloge inscriptionum graecarum, 3 ed., vol.
II [1917], no. 880,1. 51, p. 593). The burgarii received land for
cultivation from the government, and provided therefor, along the northern
borders, protection against maurauding bands and brigands, but they were
servi,
i.e., qui corporibus serviunt, rather than milites (cf. Codex
Theodosianus, XII, 19, 2). A medley of barbarian peoples were settled as
bourgarioi (cf. Isidore, Etym., IK, 4, 28, in PL 82, 351B), sometimes on
special terms as foederati, in the frontier provinces, and they
caused two regions in which they were particularly numerous to be called
Bourgariai, according to Keramopoulos (and doubted by Kyriakidis,
op. cit., pp. 16 ff.); by a not uncommon metabole Bourgarioi is said to
have become Boulgaroi, Bulgars, and Bourgaria is said to
have become Boulgaria, Bulgaria. Those peoples in the Balkans who happened
to live further from the Greek-speaking provinces, as the Serbs and Croats,
and so did not hear themselves called Bourgarioi by the Greeks,
did not so call themselves, and preserved or acquired other names, whereas
the Bulgars, the most prominent ethnic group (although Keramopoulos denies
them any real ethnic homogeneity) having common boundaries with the Greeks
in 'Bulgaria,’ land of the Bourgarioi, living in and around forts
or in the fundi

528

limitrophi (ta stratiwtotopia), came
to call themselves by the name applied to them by the Greeks. The garrison
existence of so many 'Bulgars,' in isolated military colonies, without
women, led to their being bougres and practicing bougrerie
(cf. DuCange, Gloss. lat., I [reimpr. 1937], p. 772, s.v. Bulgari). This
theory seems to explain an embarrassing reference or two to Bulgaria before
the seventh century, as when John of Nikiu speaks of the rebel Vitalianus,
in the time of the Emperor Anastasius, retreating into 'the province of
Bulgaria' (Chron., LXXXIX, 75, trans. R. H. Charles, London and Oxford,
1916, p. 130, on which cf., infra, note 31). However, since John of Nikiu
wrote towards the end of the seventh century, we had best assume that he
is referring to the political geography of his own time. Keramopoulos'
theory is rejected by Const. I. Amantos, History of the Byzantine Empire
(in Greek), II (Athens, 1947), 429-430, but it is given very serious consideration
by Kyriakidis, in his Bulgars and Slavs in Greek History. D. Detschew derives
the word Bulgar from what he believes to be the East Germanic *Bulgareis,
meaning homines pugnaces ('Der ostgermanische Ursprung des bulgarischen
Volksnamens,' Zeitschrift f. Ortsnamenforschung, II [1927], esp. pp. 199-201,
212-216).

Onogur, in Greek 'Onogouroi, whence Ouggoi,
Hungarians (the word Magyar is of Finno-Ugrian origin): Moravcsik,
Byzantinoturcica, u, 189-190, 194-196, cf. 199 ff. (Ounnoi),
and cf. 270 (s.v. Tourkoi-3. 'Ungarn'). The
Onogurs first appear in Byzantine historiography in a fragment of Priscus
where they are declared to have sent an embassy, together with the Saragurs
and the Ogurs, about 463 to Constantinople, after they had been driven
out of their homes by the Sabirs, themselves hard pressed by the Avars
(from the History of Priscus, 14, in Excerpta de legationibus [ed. Carl
de Boor, Berlin, 1903], pars II, p. 586, and cf. Suidas, sub verbo
'AbariV, Lex. ed. Ada Adler, I [Leipzig, 1928],
p. 4, on which texts see Moravcsik, Ung. Jhrb., X, 54 ff., Byzantinoturcica,
I, 301, cf. 320). The three peoples had moved westward towards the Empire
from western Siberia; had first met the Byzantines in the region north
of the Caucasus; and had despatched their embassies from the Greek cities
lying along the eastern shores of the Maeotis (Moravcsik, Ung. Jhrb., X,
59-60, 65). For some two centuries, from the late fifth to the late seventh
century, the Onogurs in large numbers remained in their new homes, north
of the Caucasus, east of Maeotis, near the river Kuban, their nearest neighbors
being the Sabirs and Alans (Ung. Jhrb., X, 65).

14. Theophanes (ed. de Boor), I, 357. The belief
of Zlatarski, Istoriya, I, 1, pp. 87, 89, 91-92, accepted by Steven Runciman,
First Bulgarian Empire, pp. 15-16, that the Utigurs formed the basis of
Old Great Bulgaria must be abandoned in the light of Moravcsik's researches.
(Although Great Bulgaria lay in the Kuban region, contrary to the contentions
of certain Bulgarian nationalist historians, Henri Gregoire has again demonstrated
that Kovrat was active in the Balkans and in continental Greece a generation
before the final settlement of the Bulgars on the Danube in 679 [on which
see infra]: I accept, although with some misgivings, the identification,
long ago made by Jirecek, of the Kurt in the list of Bulgaric khans with
the Kovrat of the Byzantine writers [on which also see infra]. Cf. Jul.
Koulakovskii, Istoria Vizantii, III [Kiev, 1915], 376 ff.)

15. The locus classicus, describing
all these events is, of course, Theophanes (ed. de Boor), I , 356-358.
(Moravcsik has assembled Theophanes' references to the Bulgars [Byzantinoturcica,
I , 335-336]). Despite the heroic efforts of Moravcsik and numerous other
scholars to get at the historical facts in Theophanes, the latter's notices
on the early Bulgars remain a confused medley of traditions that do not
fit together with much consistency.

20. Theophanes, Chronographia (ed. de Boor),
I, 356-359; Nicephorus, Opuscula historica (ed. de Boor, Leipzig, 1880),
pp. 33-35. See V. N. Zlatarski, Istoriya, I, 1, pp. 96 ff. On the attack
of the Emperor Constantine IV Pogonatus upon the Bulgars in 679-680, its
subsequent failure and the consequent rout of the Byzantines, and the Bulgar
movement in force across the Danube and up to the Balkan Mts. (681), see
Geza Feher's valuable study of Les Monuments de la culture protobulgare
et leurs relations hongroises (Budapest, 1931), pp. 12, 18, 24, 164, and
the acute study of the texts and the demonstration (contrary to V. N. Zlatarski's
view) that the Bulgars in 679-681 had actually subjugated rather than merely
combined with the so-called 'seven Slavic tribes' in Iv. Dujcev, 'Protobulgares
et Slaves: Sur le probleme de la formation de l’Etat bulgare/ Annales de
l’Institut Kondakov, X (1938), 145-154. Ju. Trifonov has shown that there
is some reason for setting Asparuch's victory over the Byzantines in the
spring of 681 and the peace towards the end of the same year, which would
make the beginning date of the First Bulgarian Empire 681, and not 679
(for which see Dujcev, Sudost-Forschungen, 1942-1943, p. 552).

31. The references to barbarian, especially
Bulgaric, attacks upon the Empire in Procopius and John Malalas are collected
in Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica, I, 306-308 (Procopius), 186-187 (Malalas).
The Empire had, of course, been menaced in the preceding generation, and
Evagrius, Eccl. Hist. (eds. J. Bidez and L. Parmentier, London, 1898, p.
100) remarks on the general destruction wrought early in Zeno's reign by
the Huns, 'once called the Massagetae,' who crossed the Danube 'with none
to prevent them,’ and also refers to the part played by the Huns in Vitalianus'
attempt to wrest the Empire from Anastasius, an episode described in a
half dozen other important sources, and to the irruption of the Sabirs
in 515 (ibid., III, 43, p. 145). Cf. John Malalas, Chronogr., lib. XVI
(Bonn, pp. 402-406); John of Antioch, in Carl de Boor, Excerpta de insidiis,
pp. 143-147; and note Zlatarski, Istoriya, I, 1, p. 47, and Moravcsik,
Ung. Jhrb., X, 69. John of Nikiu speaks of Vitalianus, in the course of
his uprising against Anastasius, as withdrawing into 'the province of Bulgaria'
(Chron., LXXXIX, 75, trans. R. H. Charles, p. 130), a text of which Gantscho
Tzenoff, Gesch. d. Bulgaren u. d. anderen Siidslaven, Berlin and Leipzig,
1935, pp. VI, 121, vigorously avails himself (and seems especially designed
for his astonishing views, on which see, infra, note 148).

The Utigurs pass out of the ken of the Byzantine historians after the
sixth century; the attempt to see in them the important Onogurs, or to
believe in the absorption of the Utigurs by the Onogurs, is dangerous.
On the Utigurs and the no less difficult problem of the Kutrigurs, and
the latter's relations with the Onogurs or 'Danube Bulgars,' see Moravcsik,
'Zur Gesch. d. Onoguren,' Ung. Jhrb., X (1930), 75-80.

71. Const. Porphyr., De Thematibus, II, 53
(PG 113, 125A). Cf. Zakythinos, Slavs in Greece, p. 43. St Willibald and
his companions, on their way to the Holy Land, about 725, are said to have
found Monemvasia 'in Slawiniae terra' (as the text should apparently read),
in Vita Willibaldi Episcopi Eichstetensis, 4 (MGH, SS, XV, pt. 1 [1887],
p. 93), a text which, as Gregorovius, op. cit., I, 113, observes (against
Hopf), is worth some consideration, while Zakythinos, op. cit., p. 44,
believes that the Vita Willibaldi is too ill-informed for this testimony
to be of any value.

73. Theophanes, A.M. 6247, ed. de Boor, I,
429. On the plague itself, which spread 'from Sicily and Calabria like
a fire to Monemvasia and Greece and the neighboring islands,' see, ibid.,
A.M. 6238, ed. de Boor, I, 422-423. When Constantine V was restoring the
aqueduct of Valentinian, destroyed by the Avars, he imported workmen from
various places in the Empire, including 500 'from Greece

533

and the islands' (ibid., A.M. 6258, ed. de Boor, I, 440). Such workmen
naturally came from the cities where there were still plenty of Greeks.

74. Coon, The Races of Europe, p. 607.

75. Leo, Tactica, const, XVIII, 99-101 (PG
107, 968D-969A), and cf. Zakythinos, Slavs in Greece, p. 35: 'The inhabitants
of the lands of the Slavs were made Greeks [egraikwhsan],
and thus did Hellenism show, yet again, its great civilizing strength.'

82. Our chief account of these events is in
Theophylact Simocatta, Historiae (old text in PG 113), ed. de Boor (for
refs. see under "AjSapot…….. in de Boor's index on p. 315, and Moravcsik,
Byzantinoturcica, I 344-345). The historian Theophanes becomes our important
source from the reign of Phocas on. Theophanes' material concerning the
Bulgaro-Turks, Avars, and Slavs, treating and fighting with the Emperor
Maurice and his predecessors, is largely drawn from Theophylact Simocatta
(Theophanes, Chronogr., ed. C. de Boor, I, 245, 252-254, 257-259, 262,
264-284, et alibi). However, Theophanes has also preserved notices, not
known from other sources, of the Hunnic invasions of Thrace in 474-475
and 561-562 (ed. de Boor, I, 120, 236-237), the Bulgaric attack of 501-502
(I, 143), together with some miscellaneous details concerning the Avaro-Byzantine
wars (i, 246, 252, 280, 290): I have taken these references from Moravcsik,
Byzantinoturcica, I, 335.

The Slavic Croats (and Serbs) were led against the Avars by the Bulgaric
Khan Kovrat, who is actually the eponymous hero, according to Gregoire,
from whom they derive their name (Crwbatoi).
The Croats and Serbs are the same people, the difference between them growing
solely out of their different histories from the seventh century on (cf.
Eugene Pittard, Les Races et l’histoire [Paris, 1924], pp. 350 ff., 'Les
Serbes et les Creates constituaient primitivement un groupe unique'). The
views of Gregoire in this connection are not new, and are those, for example,
of H. H. Ho worth, expressed in a series of articles published some seventy
years ago in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain
and Ireland (see especially XI [1882], 224-230). As for the name Serb,
Gregoire believes that Const. Porphyrogenitus was stating the fact when
he declared that Serbloi . . . th
twn 'Rwmaiwn dialektw Douloi (i.e. Latin
Servi)
prosagoreuontai (De adm. imp., 32, in PG 113,
289A). I should have thought that Gregoire, like Howorth, would derive
the name of the Serbs from the Sabiri (see pp. 226-227 of Ho worth's article).

97. See Karl Hopf, loc. cit., LXXXV, 98-99,
100-108 (a withering attack upon Fallmerayer, with refs. to his several
works). Hopf's own view that the Slavs were dominant only from 750 to 807
was immediately challenged by A. v. Gutschmid in a review of his work in
the Literar. Centralblatt, 1868, pp. 641 ff., and reprinted in Gutschmid's
Kleine Schriften, v (1894).

98. An interesting appraisal of the works of
J. Ph. Fallmerayer (1790-1861), in relation to the politics of his day,
was published by H. Warner in the North American Review for July 1864 (pp.
281-287). For a scholarly analysis of the origins of Fallmerayer's theories,
see N. M. Petrovskii, in the

535

Russian Journal of the Ministry of Public Instruction, new series, XLVIII
(1913), 104-147, which discusses the influence of Leake upon Fallmerayer
and the latter's debt to Kopitar, and the recent work of H. Seidler, Jacob
Ph. Fallmerayers geistige Entwickelung: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte
des 19. Jahrhunderis (Munich, 1947).

99. J. P. Fallmerayer, Gesch. d. Halbinsel
Morea, I, 183-185, 221, and cf. the famous effusion, ibid., pp. iii-vii
(on which see Hopf, op. cit., LXXXV, 100 ff., and Vasiliev, Hist. Byz.
Emp., I, 213-214); J. W. Zinkeisen, Gesch. Griechenlands, I (1832), 689-690,
701 ff.; and cf. G. F. Hertzberg, Gesch. Griechenlands, I (1876), 120-130.
In 1880 Const. Sathas had claimed that "historically there is no Slavic
question, the Slavs, such as modern ethnology conceives them, never having
penetrated into the Peloponnesus at all [!]" (refs. in Gregorovius-Lampros,
Athens [in Greek], I, 180), which brought objection from Gustav Meyer,
'Constantin Sathas u. die Slavenfrage in Griechenland,’ in Essays u. Studien
zur Sprachgeschichte u. Volkskunde, I (Berlin, 1885), 117-142, esp. 134
ff. The old bibliography is very extensive (and was largely utilized by
Vasiliev, Vizantiiskii Vremennik, V [1898], 404 ff., 626 ff.); it is easily
collected, and is summarized in some detail in the valuable critique of
Lubor Niederle, Slovanske Starozitnosti, II (1906), 205-216, et alibi,
and also in Max Vasmer, Die Slaven in Griechenland, pp. 1-10, although
Vasmer is, of course, chiefly interested in the literature concerning place
names (his historical account owes much to Vasiliev). The reader in a hurry
will find a succinct modern account of the Slavic invasions of Greece in
Diehl and Margais, Le Monde oriental de 395 a 1081 (2 ed., Paris, 1944),
pp. 212-221.

100. Paparrigopoulo, On the Settlement of
Some Slavic Tribes in the Peloponnesus (in Greek, Athens, 1843), esp. pp.
1-8, 46-47, 62 ff. Paparrigopoulo, like Hopf (who owes much to him), also
attacks Fallmerayer.

101. K. Hopf, loc. cit., LXXXV, 107, and N.
A. Bees, Byzantis, I (1909), 82-83, believed that the letter of Nicholas
III was the source whence the author of the Chronicle of Monemvasia drew
the statement that the Avars had controlled the (western) Peloponnesus
for 218 years, but this was, of course, shown to be erroneous when J. B.
Kougeas published the Scholium of Arethas, written in 932, which contains
the same statement (Neos Hellen., IX [1912], 475, 478), i.e., more than
a century and a half, at the very least, before Nicholas III: Kougeas believed
that the Chronicle, in its earlier form, dated from about the reign of
Nicephorus II Phocas, i.e., 963-969 (op. cit., pp. 477-478).

102. We may note, among others, Max Vasmer
(op. cit. in note 5 above), a study of the Slavic place-names in Greece;
Const. Amantos, 'The Slavs in Greece' (in Greek), in the Byzantinisch-Neugriechische
Jahrbucher, XVII (1944), 210-221 (a critique of Vasmer's work); on Vasmer,
see also Dem. J. Georgakas, 'Beitrage zur Deutung als Slavisch erklarter
Ortsnamen,' Byz. Zeitschr., XLI (1941), 351-381; P. Charanis, 'The Hellenization
of Sicily and Southern Italy during the Middle Ages,’ American Historical
Review, LII (1946), 74-86, esp. 83 ff., and 'Nicephorus I, the Savior of
Greece from the Slavs,' Byzantina-Metabyzantina, I (1946), 75-92; and,
especially, D. A. Zakythinos, Slavs in Greece. The subject of the Slavs
in Greece has been pursued with unflagging interest in recent years, and
the following books deal with some of its multiple problems (in Greek);
A. Keramopoulos, The Greeks and Their Northern Neighbors, Athens, 1945;
A. Diomidis, Byzantine Studies, II: The Slavic Attacks upon Greece and
the Policy of Byzantium, Athens, 1946; Stilpon P. Kyriakidis, Bulgars and
Slavs in Greek History (Thessalonica, 1946), and by the same author, Byzantine
Studies, VI: The Slavs in [the] Peloponnesus (Thessalonica, 1947); and
S. Pagoulatos, The Slavs in [the] Peloponnesus up to Nicephorus I (805
A.D.) (Athens, 1948).

112. Cf. Kougeas, Neos Hellen., IX (1912),
476; Bees, Byzantis, I, 76 ff.; Zakythinos, Slavs in Greece, pp. 40-41.
The pertinent section in the Monemvasiote petition is printed in Neos Hellen.,
XII (1915), 286-287, on which see Mercati, Scritti d'Isidoro il cardinale
Ruteno, pp. 8-9 ff. On the relations of Arethas, the different versions
of the Chronicle, and the letter of the Patriarch Nicholas III to one another,
see Kyriakidis, Byzantine Studies, VI, pp. 73 ff.

113. Lampros, Historika Meletemata, p. 118,
cf. 109, 114; Neos Hellen., IX (1912), 250; Bees, Byzantis, I, 74; Zakythinos,
Slavs in Greece, p. 41. (In quoting the pertinent section from Lampros,
Zakythinos' eye fell from one line to the next, and he missed entirely
the first part of Lampros' division of the material in the Chronicle into
three parts.)

116. I am inclined to agree with Charanis,
Byzantina-Metabyzantina, I, 88, against Zakythinos, Slavs in Greece, pp.
41-43, that the common source upon which the author (or authors) of the
Chron. of Monemvasia and Arethas drew was a written one and not merely
eiV
ton proforikon plouton tou peloponnhsiakou laou (Zakythinos, op.
cit., p. 41). Also Zakythinos' rejection of the Chronicle as a sound source
is rather too cavalier (op. cit., p. 43).

122. Maurice became Emperor on 13 August 582,
and so his sixth year terminated on 12 August 588. The Empress Irene was
deposed on 31 October 802, and so the fourth year of the reign of Nicephorus
I terminated on 1 November 806: the 218 years in question could thus be
587-805 or 588-806, the former dates probably being the proper ones, since
the Chronicle of Monemvasia notes that Patras was reestablished, patriarcountoV
eti Tarasiou, and the patriarchate of Tarasius terminated on 18
February 806 (cf. V. Grumel, Les Actes des Patriarches, vol. I. fasc. 2
[1936], p. 12).

123. For what her testimony is worth we may
note again the contrary statement of the nun who wrote the life of St Willibald,
Bishop of Eichstadt: she says, of the pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land
with Willibald (ca 725), ' . . . et inde [from Syracuse in Sicily] navigantes,
venerunt ultra mare Adria ad urbem Manafasiam in Slawinia terrae [sic]
. . . ' (Vita Willibaldi Episcopi Eichstetensis, 4, in MGH, SS, xv, pt.
1 [1887], p. 93). Hopf, loc. cit., LXXXV, 57, and Zakythinos, Slavs in
Greece, p. 44, see no value in this source because of the geographical
ignorance of the writer, who puts Tyre and Sidon on the Adriatic (cf. Hopf,
op. cit., LXXXV, 106). Gregorovius-Lampros, Athens (in Greek), I, 178-179,
sees the source as of some value. In any event the testimony is inconsistent
with the state-

537

ment in the Chronicle of Monemvasia and the Scholium of Arethas, which
are obviously accurate in this particular. Vasmer's studies have made the
fact clearer even than it was before 'dass der Osten Griechenlands weniger
slavische Einflilsse aufweist als der Westen. Im Peloponnes sind Korinth
und namentlich Argolis am schwachsten von der Slaveninvasion betroffen,
in Mittelgriechenland Attika und Bootien' (Die Slaven in Griechenland,
p. 317).

124. Ibid., Byzantis, I, 68-69; Scholium of
Arethas, in Neos Hellen., IX, 475. Towards the end of 812, or early in
813, the Emperor Michael I Rhangabe appointed one Leo, a member of the
family of the Skleroi, the first known Strategos of the Peloponnesus (...
Leonta
ton apilegomenon tou Sklhrou . . . epoihse
. . . strathgon eiV Peloponnhson), according
to the Scriptor Incertus, De Leone V (ed. Bonn, with Leo Grammaticus and
Eustathius [vol. 47, 1842], p. 336), a text apparently disregarded by Heinrich
Gelzer, Die Genesis der byzantinischen Themenverfassung (Leipzig, 1899),
p. 91. There is still extant a lead seal almost certainly that of the Leo
Skleros in question, for which see N. A. Bees, 'Zur Sigillographie der
byzantinischen Themen Peloponnes und Hellas,' in Vizantiiskii Vremennik,
XXI, pt. 3 (1914-15), 91-92.

129. Even the late Professor S. H. Cross could
write that 'in 588 they [the Slavs] had penetrated the Peloponnesus, where
their occupation was so formidable that for the next two centuries a Byzantine
Greek scarcely dared set foot in the southern part of the peninsula' (in
the Handbook of Slavic Studies [ed. L. I. Strakhovsky, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1949], p. 7).

130. J. D. Mansi, XI, col. 689 A (cited by
Dvornik, Les Slaves, Byzance et Rome, p. 241): 'Stephen, by the grace of
God, Bishop of the Corinthian metropolis, in the province of Greece, for
myself and the synod under me I have signed.'

136. Hilduin (Abbot of St Denis), Prolegomena
ad Vitam S. Dionysii, 10 (PL 106, col. 19 BC), on which see Fr. V. Laurent,
'L'Erection de la metropole d'Athenes,’ in Etudes Byzantines, I (1943-44),
67-71. The first official notices, however, of Athens as a metropolis come
in 870 and 879 (Mansi, XVI, 191 B, and ibid., XVII, 373 D). The Athenian
problem is rather a complicated one, however, which I shall discuss, with
some fullness, in my study of Athens in the Middle Ages.

139. Men. Prot., Legat. ad Rom., 14 (PG 113,
817 D, 820 A; ed. C. de Boor, Excerpta de legationibus, I, 2 [1903], p.
458). Baian sent ten thousand Kutrigurs to ravage Dalmatia, with the observation
that if they perished in the undertaking, he would not be disturbed on
their account (ei kai sumbaih ge sfisi wanatw alwnai,
all' emoige mh genesqai tina sunaisqhsin).
Tibor Horvath, Plesperia, VI, 239, says that 'the graves are those of Kuturgur
warriors who fell in the vanguard.’ (Horvath would seem to go somewhat
astray in still believing, with Feher and H6man, that the Kutrigurs were
the 'Danube Bulgars' [cf. Moravcsik, Ungarische Jahrbucher, X, 73]). The
general bibliography is in Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica, I, 41-42.

140. In the two graves at Corinth under discussion
remains of eight skeletons were found, from which three skulls were sufficiently
whole to permit of scientific examination by Professor J. Koumaris (of
Athens), who reported on them that 'to be identified with the Avars the
skulls should be brachycephalic, whereas these are dolichocephalic' (Hesp.,
VI, 230). Actually, although crania found in Avaric graves do tend toward
brachycephaly, meso- and sometimes (perhaps rarely) even strongly dolichocephalic
finds are also made (cf. Arnold Marosi and Nandor Fettich, Trouvailles
avares de Dunapentele (Budapest, 1936), pp. 100-105 [by Louis Bartucz]).
An historico-anthropological discussion on the basis of the three Corinthian
skulls would be very futile, but a few comments may be permitted. The Avars
were, as indicated, brachycephalic, and these skulls are almost certainly
not Avaric. Even leaving aside the objects found in the graves with the
skeletons in question, there would be reason to believe that they were,
most likely, not Greek, for most Greeks, especially those in the region
around Corinth, apparently were and still are low brachycephals. As far
as the cranial measurements go, these skulls could be those of Slavs, for
although the Slavs in central Europe are today by and large brachycephalic,
they were, surprisingly enough, dolichocephalic originally, and remained
so until about the fourteenth century or so, from which time they have
become progressively brachycephalic (cf. Krum Drontschilow, Beitrage zur
Anthropologie der Bulgaren [diss. Berlin, Brunswick, 1914], p. 31, with
refs. to works of Bogdanov, Niederle, and Matiegka; L. Niederle, Manuel
de Vantiquite slave, I, 9-12; C. S. Coon, The Races of Europe, pp. 218-220).
But as far as the cranial measurements go, the skulls could also be and
(I think) are those of Bulgars: the strong tendency of the modern Bulgarian
toward dolichocephaly is well known, and although the nation as a whole
is today mesocephalic, the early Bulgaric peoples (i.e., Onogurs, Kutrigurs)
were dolichocephalic (cf. Drontschilow, op. cit., pp. 18 ff.; J. B. Loritz,
Anthropologische Untersuchungen an bulgarischen Schadeln aus alter u. neuer
Zeit (diss. Munich, 1915); Wm. T. Ripley, The Races of Europe (1899, repr.
1937), pp. 425 ff.; Eugene Pittard, Les Races et l’histoire (Paris, 1924),
pp. 282, 356-359; and Coon, op. cit., pp. 610-611). The assignment of the
skeletal remains in the graves at Corinth to any given people must

539

obviously be based, not upon cranial measurements, but upon historical
and archaeological evidence.

143. Cf. Neos Hell., XII, p. 285,11. 15-16:
'Latin strength having achieved this effect' [ergou
gegonuiaV thV latinikhV dexiaV]. There has been no reason to take
seriously an interpolation in the text of George Phrantzes (cf. St Binon,
Echos d'Orient, XXXVII, p. 279, n. 1, and cf. pp. 300 ff.), to the effect
that Monemvasia, which was his native city, became a metropolitan see in
the tune of the Emperor Maurice, and was subsequently confirmed in this
status by Alexius Comnenus and others (Chron., IV, 16, in ed. Bonn, pp.
398-399), since its errors were observed by Michel Le Quien, Oriens Christianus,
II (Paris, 1740), cols. 216 ff. From the later tenth century there is extant
a lead seal of one 'George, Bishop of Monemvasia' (N. A. Bees, Viz. Vremennik,
XXI, pt. 3 [1914-15], 106-110), but the lead seal in Gust. Schlumberger,
Sigillographie de l’empire byzantin (Paris, 1884), no. 1, p. 185, should
probably be ascribed to the Bishop of Modon, not Monemvasia (Bees, Viz.
Vremennik, XXI, 104-106).

146. The 'old manuscript' was produced by
the 'grand chartophylax' of the patriarchal court at the Synod of 1397
(Miklosich and Muller, Acta et diplomata, II, 288); we are informed that
he read and expounded the text, and he may have caused some of the confusion.

154. See Hopf, loc. cit., LXXXV, 98-99; cf.
H. Gelzer, in Jahrbucher f. protestantische Theologie, XII (1886), 368;
Zakythinos, Slavs in Greece, p. 51; and P. Charanis, Byzantina-Metabyzantina,
I (1946), 77-78, 82, concerning the passage in Theophanes' Chronographia
describing the repopulation of 'Sclavinia' by Christians under Nicephorus
I in 809-810 (A.M. 6302, in PG 108, 976-977, and ed. C. de Boor, I, 486).
However, a little earlier in his work Theophanes makes clear his use of
the word Sclavinia in one connection at least (ed. de Boor, I, 430, 21-22):
ai
kata [i.e., 'in'] thn Makedonian Sklauiniai.
The word Sclavinia seldom occurs in Theophanes, but it seems to mean absolutely
the same thing in each case (see de Boor, II, 705). Cf. Max Vasmer, Die
Slaven in Griechenland, p. 176, and Zakythinos, Slavs in Greece, p. 29.
I am unable to place much confidence in the identification of Sclavinia
as the Peloponnesus in the Theophanes passage noted above (cf. Runciman,
First Bulgarian Empire, pp. 55, 59); the Chron. of Monemvasia says, of
course, that Nicephorus repeopled Lacedaemonia by enforced immigration
from certain Asiatic Themes (see supra, and cf. Zakythinos, Slavs in Greece,
p. 51); but I doubt whether Theophanes is referring to this fact, and I
am here concerned solely with Theophanes' use of the word Sclavinia. (It
is possible that Nicephorus did plant Asiatic colonists in Lacedaemonia,
on which cf. also Bury, Eastern Roman Empire [1912], p. 378.) If Sclavinia
can mean the Peloponnesus in Theophanes, I might read the expedition of
657-658 'into Sclavinia' as the expulsion of the Onogurs from Corinth.
However, it seems to me best to regard Theophanes' account of Nicephorus'
colonization of Sclavinia in 809-810 as referring only to Macedonia, since
everywhere else in Theophanes the word Sclavinia appears to mean Macedonia.
There was, furthermore, considering the Bulgarian menace in the north,
an especial reason for the colonization of Macedonia, for 'it was the aim
of the Bulgarians to bring the Macedonian Slavs under their dominion' (Bury,
Eastern Roman Empire, p. 342). The settlement of Sclavinia by 'Roman' colonists,
to help hold down the Slavs in Macedonia, would be a natural preparation
for the great campaign of the spring and summer of 811 which ended in the
death of Nicephorus and in one of the great disasters of Byzantine history
(Theophanes, A.M. 6303, ed. de Boor, I, 490-491; Geo. Monachus, Chron.,
ed. de Boor, II [1904], 774-775; 'Leo Grammaticus,' Chronogr., in ed. Bonn.
pp. 204-205; Geo. Cedrenus, Hist, compend. [Bonn, II, 41-42]; and John
Zonaras, Epit. hist., XV, 15 [Bonn, m, 309-311]). The letter of the Emperor
Michael II the Amorian to Louis the Pious, announcing the establishment
of

541

Michael's authority in the Byzantine Empire (824), notes that Thomas
the Slavonian had drawn the forces for his great rebellion 'de . . . partibus
Thraciae, Macedoniae, Thessaloniae [sic], et circumiacentibus Sclaviniis’
(Mansi, XIV, col. 418 D), and this seems to be pretty much the meaning
of the word Sclavinia in the text of Theophanes. Cf. Kyriakidis, op. cit.,
pp. 11-13.

155. Davidson, Hesperia, VI, 238; Katharine
M. Edwards, Corinth, VI: The Coins (1932), 165, and 'Report on the Coins
found at Corinth during the years 1930-1935,' in Hesperia, VI, 255. The
totals are thus given by Miss Davidson [up to 1937]:

Maurice (582-602):

26 coins

Constantine V (741-775):

1

Phocas (602-610):

29

Leo IV (775-780):

2

Heraclius (610-641):

14

Nicephorus I (802-811):

2

Constans II (641-668):

54 (!)

Michael I (811-813):

1

Constantine IV (668-685):

2

Leo V (813-820):

3

Tiberius III (698-705):

1

Michael II (820-829):

4

The numismatic evidence now reveals as quite false the picture of Corinth
in the seventh century drawn for us by Gregorovius: 'Noch durch Handel
[!] lebhaft, verdunkelte diese [die Stadt Korinth] alle ubrigen Stadte
Griechenlands' (see Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter, I, 101-102),
which seems to be based only on Hierocles' listing of Thebes as the (civil)
metropolis of Boeotia, Athens as the metropolis of Attica, and Corinth
as the metropolis of all Greece. Joshua Starr has published the epitaph
of a Corinthian dyer, presumably from the end of the tenth or the early
eleventh century (Byz.-Neugr. Jhrb., XII [1936], 42-49). There was some
industry and prosperity in Corinth in the later ninth and tenth centuries
(and thereafter, on which cf. J. H. Finley, in Speculum, VII [1932], 481-82)
to which the story of Danielis and the Vitae of St Peter of Argos, St Luke
of Stiris, St Nicon the 'Metanoeite,' and some other sources testify (which
will be treated in my Athens in the Middle Ages, and cf. Zakythinos, Slavs
in Greece, p. 46), but there was no real wealth or productive activity
in Corinth in the seventh and eighth centuries. There was no building in
Corinth, or in the rest of the Peloponnesus, in the seventh and eighth
centuries (cf. on this point the remarks of Ant. Bon, in Zakythinos, L'Hellenisme
contemporain, 2nd ser., in [1949], 110-111). (Coins of Constans II are
also vastly more numerous at Athens than those of his predecessors and
successors [Hesperia, v (1936), p. 148], which is what we should expect.)

The inscriptions found at Corinth tell the same story, or rather they
tell no story at all. Sixth-century inscriptions are fairly numerous, but
the seventh century remains a blank. Of some 66 inscriptions published
by Professor N. A. Bees, in Die griechisch-christlichen Inschriften des
Peloponnes, Athens, 1941 (Corpus der griechisch-christlichen Inschriften
von Hellas, I, 1: Isthmos-Korinthos), only 6 are assigned as probably to
the seventh century (see nos. 17, 21, 27, 34, 37, 45). I could see no basis
for dating these inscriptions at all, and appealed to Professor B. D. Meritt
for comment; Meritt writes 'that I see no evidence intelligible to me for
assigning any precise dates to these inscriptions' (letter of 6 December
1949).

159. Salonika, Archaeological Museum, no.
588: American Agora Collection, inv. no. B282 (refs from Davidson, Hesperia,
VI, 233-234). For the buckle recovered at Aphiona on Corfu, see Heinrich
Bulle, 'Ausgrabungen bei Aphiona auf Korfu,' Mitteilungen d. deutschen
archdol. Institute, Athen. Abteilung, LIX [1934], 222, fig. 26, nos. 20-24:
Bulle (esp. pp. 236 ff.) regards the finds at Aphiona as of Avaric origin.
Aphiona, however, is not so far from the plain of Monastir where the Onogur
prince Kovrat established his settlement: it also lies within easy reach
of the Emperor Constans II’s route to Italy; and the finds at Aphiona could
quite reasonably be explained in either connection. Still another such
buckle, found in Athens, and alluded to supra in the text, bears a Christian
monogram (ibid., p. 226, fig. 27), interpreted as fwV
zwh, and a very similar buckle with a similar monogram has also
been found at Taormina in Sicily (see next note). Hans Zeiss, 'Avarenfunde
in Korinth?' in Serta Hoffilleriana [Hoffillerov Zbornik] (Zagreb, 1940),
pp. 95-99, believes that all these buckles are of Byzantine origin or,
at least, of Byzantine manufacture; doubt is expressed on this score in
the text; nor am I entirely certain, with regard to the buckles bearing
the Christian monogram, found at Athens and Taormina, that 'die griechische
Inschrift erweist das Stuck als byzantinische Arbeit' (op. cit., p. 96).
But if the Bulgars wished to write, they possessed no other language to
write in; they never had an alphabet of their own, and the Slavonic alphabet
did not yet exist (the Bulgars used Greek in their later inscriptions);
also we might expect some Christian decorative emblems to be employed by
the Onogur Bulgars at this time. The Khan Kovrat and, presumably, some
other Onogurs were converted to Christianity during the reign of Heraclius
(for the evidence, especially from the Coptic chronicle of John of Nikiu,
see Gregoire, Byzantion, XVII [1944-45], 101-102), and Moravcsik believes
it possible that the Onogurs possessed an organized church in their homeland,
the Kuban region, at this time (Ungarische Jahrbiicher, X [1930], 64-65).
There were many Bulgar Christians long before the official date of the
'conversion of the Bulgars,’ now set in 863-864 (on which, see A. Vaillant
and M. Lascaris, in Revue des etudes slaves, XIII [1933], 5-15). However,
if the buckles in question should ever prove to be of Byzantine manufacture,
which I doubt, their relatively high incidence in Hungarian graves is remarkable,
on which see Davidson, Hesperia, VI, pp. 232-236, figs. 2-5; pp. 236-238,
figs. 6-8, with numerous refs. to the finds in Hungarian graves described
in Joseph Hampel's great Alterthumer d. fruhen Mittelalters in Ungarn.
Dr Horvath, Miss Davidson's collaborator, believed the finds at Corinth
belonged to the Kutrigur Bulgars (Hesperia VI, 239). Miss Davidson seems
not to have noticed that Zeiss had already claimed a Byzantine origin for
some buckles similar to those found at Corinth (cf. Athen. Mitt., LIX [1934],
227). Zeiss also calls attention to a buckle of heart-shaped design, somewhat
similar to those under discussion, as having been found in a Visigothic
grave at San Pedro de Alcantara, Malaga, Spain (Zeiss, Die Grabfunde aus
dem spanischen Westgotenreich, Berlin and Leipzig, 1934, pl. 21, no. 9,
and cf. pp. 52 and 122). The province of Malaga, however, is on the coast,
and many strange things come over the sea. In his discussion of the late-Roman
(or Byzantine) origin of certain of the basic designs of these buckles,
Zeiss cites O. M. Dalton, East Christian Art (Oxford, 1925), pp. 362 ff.,
the direct relevance of which to the question he is discussing is not apparent
to me. Zeiss also cites Alois Riegl, Spatromische Kunstindustrie (Vienna,
1927), pp. 290-291, but I find that the examples taken by Riegl to illustrate
the alleged Byzantine artistic forms and motifs involved come from a Lombard
grave in Ascoli Piceno, from south Russia, and from the Egyptian Fayum,
and although the buckle found in south Russia is decorated with an inscribed
palmette very similar to a marble decoration from S. Vitale in Ravenna,
the Byzantinism of these buckles still, it seems to me, remains in question.
Other buckles of like form have been found in the Crimea and hi southern
Russia (N. Repnikov, in Bulletin du Musee d'Etat de Chersonnese Taurique
[Khersonesskii Sbornik], [II, Sevastopol, 1927], p. 153, fig. 8, and Lothar
Fr. Zotz, Die spatgermanische Kultur Schlesiens im Graberfeld von Gross-Surding
[1935], p. 14, fig. 9, refs. from Zeiss). For Byzantine influence upon
the jewelry, ornaments, weapons, etc., of the Avars, Bulgars, and others,
found in Hungarian graves, see, in general: Joseph Hampel, Alterthumer
des fruhen Mittelalters in Ungarn (3

161. Some of the buckles found in south Italian
graves, together with those few found in northern Italy, came into the
possession of the Lombards through, presumably, the Avars, themselves in
close contact with the Bulgars and the Byzantines.

162. The papyrus has been published four times
by Carl Wessely: see the Studien zur Palaeographie und Papyruskunde, XX
(Leipzig, 1921), no. 133, p. 100. D. Detschew erroneously saw a proper
name in the word boulgarikos (in the Zeitschrift fur Ortsnamenforschung,
II [Munich and Berlin, 1927], 198); at least so I believe; I have followed
Moravcsik's reading of this text, which is much more likely, in view of
the reference to 'Bulgarian belts' in the Tactica of the Pseudo-Maurice
(see infra).

The writer wishes to express his indebtedness to his learned young friend
Mr George Chr. Soulis, who supplied him with some very valuable bibliographical
information; to the Editor of SPECULUM, who assumed more than his share
of the burden of seeing this article through the press; and to the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, whose grant of a generous Fellowship
made possible the leisure during which some of the research in this paper
was done.

Miss Gladys R. Davidson, now Mrs Sol M. Weinberg, will soon publish
an extensive work on the 'small finds' at Corinth, with a great abundance
of photographs. I do not know whether or not there is more than one 'Bulgaric
buckle' in the Archaeological Museum at Salonika (see, supra, note 159).
Although I succeeded in getting into the Museum this summer, after arousing
the janitor's wife from an afternoon siesta, there was no informed person
on hand of whom I could inquire concerning such belt buckles and their
whereabouts.

The reader's attention is called to the article that follows by Professor
John Harvey Kent on an interesting inscription found at Corinth which seems
to fit perfectly into the interpretation of texts and events given above.